A Million Miles in a Thousand Years Quotes

“Suffering, as absurd as it seemed, pointed to a greater story in which, if one would only construe himself as a character within, he could find fulfillment in his tragic role, knowing the plot was heading toward redemption.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“I didn't want to get well, because if I got well, nobody would come and save me anymore. And I didn't want to get well, because while I could not control my happiness, I could control my misery, and I would rather have had control than live in the tension of what if. A chance of hope is no pacifier against a sure tragedy.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“Where there is an absence of story, or perhaps a bad story, a good storyteller walks in and changes reality. He doesn't critique the existing story, or lament about his boredom, like a critic. He just tells something different and invites other people into the new story he is telling.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

“What I’m saying is I think life is staggering and we’re just used to it. We all are 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,”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“I only say this about the children because I used to believe charming people were charming because they were charming, or confident people were confident because they were confident. But all this is, of course, circular. The truth is, we are all living out the character of the roles we have played in our stories.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“And I found myself wanting even better stories. And that’s the thing you’ll realize when you organize your life into the structure of story.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“It made me think about the hard lives so many people have had, the sacrifices they’ve endured, and how those people will see heaven differently from those of us who have had easier lives.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“If you want to know what a person’s story is about, just ask them what they want.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“fear isn’t only a guide to keep us safe; it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“People who live good stories are too busy to write about them. Nobody ever strapped a typewriter to the back of an elephant and wrote a novel while hunting wild game. Nobody except for Hemmingway.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“His conclusion was that the human body displayed physical evidence that we are not the same person we were when we were kids, or even a season before. He said we think we are the same person, but we aren’t. “People get stuck, thinking they are one kind of person, but they aren’t.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“once you know what it takes to live a better story, you don’t have a choice.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“I pictured his daughter flipping through the channels of life, as it were, stopping on a story that seemed most compelling at the moment, a story that offered her something, anything, because people can’t live without a story, without a role to play.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“If you aren’t telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“A story is a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it,”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“Before this, I couldn't understand why a person would commit suicide. And while I now have the perspective that only comes from distance, and the perspective always comes, I know the power of a lie has to shrink time into what seems the eternal end of things. It is a true miracle I survived that hour. I wasn't numb anymore. I was allowed to feel the brunt of it. The bones penetrated my chest in a sudden rip, emptying a body of blood down my shirt and onto my lap. The blood pooled in the lap of my pants and seeped into the carpet in my hotel room. I clasped my hand over my heart and knelt between the bed and the television and rolled onto the floor and cried out to God a lamenting demand that he would come and save me from the sorrow that, for the immensity of it, I could only attribute to him in the first place. I didn't want to learn whatever it was he wanted to teach me. I cried to him an angry petition for rescue. I doubted him and needed him at the same time. God seemed to me, in that moment, a cruel father burning a scar into my skin with his cigarette. And yet I knew he was the only one with the power to make the pain go away.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can’t go back to being normal; you can’t go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time. The more practice stories I lived, the more I wanted an epic to climb inside of and see through till its end.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“And that’s the thing you’ll realize when you organize your life into the structure of story. You’ll get a taste for one story and then want another, and then another, and the stories will build until you’re living a kind of epic of risk and reward, and the whole thing will be molding you into the actual character whose roles you’ve been playing.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“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

“Once an ambition has been decided, a positive turn is an event that moves the protagonist closer to the ambition, and a negative turn moves the protagonist away from his ambition. All”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

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

“He even says resistance, a kind of feeling that comes against you when you point toward a distant horizon, is a sure sign that you are supposed to do the thing in the first place. The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be, Pressfield believes. If I learned anything from thinking about my father, it’s that there is a force in the world that doesn’t want us to live good stories.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“But it’s a good trade, because as soon as you point toward a horizon, life no longer feels meaningless.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“It’s true that while ambition creates fear, it also creates the story.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“But fear isn’t only a guide to keep us safe; it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“The rule exists in story because it’s a true thing about people. 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 isn’t all that comfortable. And even if they secretly want for something better.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“Here’s the truth about telling stories with your life. It’s going to sound like a great idea, and you are going to get excited about it, and then when it comes time to do the work, you’re not going to want to do it. It’s like that with writing books, and it’s like that with life. People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“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