A Million Miles in a Thousand Years Quotes

“It is when people do not allow God to show up through them ... that the world collapses in on itself.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“When you fly across the country in an airplane the country seems vast; but it isn't vast. It's all connected by roads one can ride a bike down. If you watch the news and there's a tragedy at a house in Kansas, that guy's driveway connects with yours, and you'd be surprised by how few roads it takes to get there.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“We believe we will be made whole by our accomplishments, our possessions, or our social status. It's written in the fabric of our DNA that life used to be beautiful and now it isn't, and if only this and only that, it would be beautiful again.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“The real voice is stiller and smaller and seems to know, without confusion, the difference between right and wrong and the subtle delineation between the beautiful and profane. It's not an agitated voice, but ever patient as though it approves a million false starts. The voice I am talking about is a deep water of calming wisdom.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“Book of Ecclesiastes, God is saying...
Write a good story, take somebody with you and let me help”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“The inciting incident is how you get (characters) to do something. It's the doorway through which they can't return, you know. The story takes care of the rest.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“He captures memories because if he forgets them, it's as though they didn't happen.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“Your life is a blank page. You write on it.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“When I arrived home from Boston, I realized there were no pictures on my mantel. I set down my suitcase and walked into the living room and looked across to the fireplace, and it felt empty. Empty of real stories. I went to my bedroom where the bed was made, and on my desk there were no pictures in frames and on the end tables there were no pictures. There was a framed picture of Yankee Stadium above the toilet in the bathroom, and there was some art I’d picked up in my travels, but there was little evidence of an actual character living an actual life. My home felt like a stage on which props had been set for a face story rather than a place where a person lived an actual human narrative.

It’s an odd feeling to be awakened from a life of fantasy. You stand there looking at a bare mantel and the house gets an eerie feel, as though it were haunted by a kind of nothingness, an absence of something that could have been, an absence of people who could have been living here, interacting with me, forcing me out of my daydreams. I stood for a while and heard the voices of children who didn’t exist and felt the tender touch of a wife who wanted me to listen to her. I felt, at once, the absent glory of a life that could have been.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“But the people who took the bus didn't experience the city as we experienced the city. The pain made the city more beautiful. The story made us different characters than we would have been if we had skipped the story and showed up at the ending an easier way.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“[He] said he didn't think we should be afraid to embrace whimsy. I asked him what he meant by whimsy, and he struggled to define it. 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.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“When you live countless stories in which you play a sedentary role, it's an odd feeling to switch stories.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“Humans are designed to seek comfort and order, and so if they have comfort and order, they tend to plant themselves, even if their comfort is not all that comfortable, even if they see clearly want for something better.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn't have when you're actually living it. It's as though the whole thing were designed to be understood in hindsight, as though you'll never know the meaning of your experiences until you've had enough of them to provide reference.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“What I'm saying is I think life is staggering and we're just used to it. We are all like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we're given - it's just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“We were made to be distracted by life, by story.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“The same principles that make up a good story also make up a good life.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“You’re right,” he finally said. “You aren’t living a good story.” “That’s what I was saying.” “I see,” he said. “What do I do about that?” “You’re a writer. You know what to do.” “No, I don’t.” Jordan looked at me with his furrowed brow again. “You put something on the page,” he said. “Your life is a blank page. You write on it.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“...there is a force in the world that doesn't want us to live good stories. It doesn't want us to face our issues, to face our fear and bring something beautiful into the world... I believe God wants us to create beautiful stories, and whatever it is that isn't God wants us to create meaningless stories, teaching the world around us that life just isn't worth living.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“And once you know what it takes to live a better story, you don't have a choice. Not living a better story would be like deciding to die, deciding to walk around numb until you die, and it's not natural to want to die.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me specifically into the story, and He put us in specifically with the sunsets in the rainstorms as though to say, "Enjoy your place in My story, the very beauty of it means it's not about you, and in time that will give you comfort.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“...I wondered about the story we were writing and wanted even more to write a better story for myself, something that leaves a beautiful feeling even as the credits roll.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“The human body essentially recreates iteself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were in February.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“The mountains themselves call us into greater stories.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“And once you know what it takes to live a better story, you don’t have a choice. Not living a better story would be like deciding to die, deciding to walk around numb until you die, and it’s not natural to want to die.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“Lucy doesn’t read self-help books about how to be a dog; she just is a dog.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“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.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“Writing a story isn’t about making your peaceful fantasies come true. The whole point of the story is the character arc. 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.” His voice was like thunder now. “You put your characters through hell. You put them through hell. That’s the only way we change.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you like them for who they are. And when you stop expecting material possessions to complete you, you'd be surprised how much pleasure you get from 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.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“If you think about it, we get robbed of the mystery of being alive. I think we get robbed of the glory of it because we don't remember how we got here. When you get born, you wake up slowly to everything. From birth to 26, God is slowly turning on the lights, and you are groggy and pointing at things, and say "Circle," and, "Blue,", and, "Car," and, "Sex," and then, "Job," and, "Healthcare". The experience is so slow, you could easily come to believe life isn't that big of a deal, that life isn't staggering. Life IS staggering, and we are just too used to it.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life