A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

by Donald Miller

He said it’s that nagging idea that life could be magical; it could be special if we were only willing to take a few risks.

Defining whimsy.

I’d started an epic story of my own. And life no longer felt meaningless.

The reward you get from a story is always less than you thought it would be, and the work is harder than you imagined.

The point of a story is never about the ending, remember.

It’s about your character getting molded in the hard w...

you become the character in the story you are living, and whatever you were is gone.

You didn’t think joy could change a person, did you? Joy is what you feel when the conflict is over. But it’s conflict that changes a person.”

You put them through hell. That’s the only way we change.”

when something hard happens to you, you have two choices in how to deal with it. You can either get bitter, or better.

men don’t bond unless they risk their lives together,

I realized how much of our lives are spent trying to avoid conflict.

how every conflict, no matter how hard, comes back to bless the protagonist if he will face his fate with courage.

There is no conflict man can endure that will not produce a blessing.

It hurts now, but I’ll love t...

You can’t go on without a story any longer than you can read a book about nothing.

misery, though seemingly ridiculous, indicates life itself has the potential of meaning, and therefore pain itself must also have meaning.

story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.

When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are. And when you stop expecting material possessions to complete you, you’d be surprised at how much pleasure you get in material possessions. And when you stop expecting God to end all your troubles, you’d be surprised how much you like spending time with God.

When we look back on our lives, what we will remember are the crazy things we did, the times we worked harder to make a day stand out.

We don’t know how much we are capable of loving until the people we love are being taken away, until a beautiful story is ending.

when asked how long we have been married by saying, “Not long enough.”

You can’t build an end scene as beautiful as this by sitting on a couch,

It wasn’t necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.

!!!!!!

He invites other people into the story with him, giving them a better story too.