A Million Miles in a Thousand Years Quotes

“The point of a story is the character arc, the change.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“IF THE POINT of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“We think stories are about getting money and security, but the truth is, it all comes down to relationships.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“you have to create 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

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

“a story involves 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

“Good stories don’t happen by accident, I learned. They are planned.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“I wondered whether a person could plan a story for his life and live it intentionally.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“A good movie has memorable scenes, and so does a good life.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“I have a hope, it’s that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story, and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“I didn't want to be rescued and get well, because if I got rescued and got well then 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. 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.

But I was a tree in a story about a forest. And it was arrogant of me to believe any different. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“misery, though seemingly ridiculous, indicates life itself has the potential of meaning, and therefore pain itself must also have meaning.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“The beauty of the inlet was nearly that of Peru, and I wondered at all this exposition God had created, as though it were an invitation to an epic so grand it might match the scenery. The mountains themselves call us into greater stories, I thought.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“I wondered then if life weren’t about nature, if we were supposed to live in the woods and grow into the forest like tree moss.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“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

“what our stories are about matters, not just for us but for the world.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“all of us are living stories, and those stories teach other people to live stories.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“place. I wondered whether a person could plan a story for his life and live it intentionally.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

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

“Bob and Maria's kids, now grown and in high school and college, each have a quiet dignity and confidence. They also have an informal charm. [...] It is obvious they'd played the roles in the story their family was living, the roles of foreign dignitaries, traveling with their parents on the important assignment of asking world leaders what they hope in. Their STORY had given them their CHARACTER.

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 of 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

“Marcos explained that our bodies were designed to change and it isn't possible to be stagnant. He showed me a slide of himself at the beginning of the year and of the new lines on his face that had deepened since. He said our interaction with each other, with the outside world, and with intangible elements such as time made us different people every season. 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.'

For instance, Marcos said, 'The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly ever cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were in February,' he told me.

I thought about Marcos's conclusions and wondered [...] if he wasn't right, that we were designed to live through something rather than to attain something, and the thing we were meant to live through was designed to change us. The point of a story is the character arc, the change.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“I've never walked out of a meaningless movie thinking ALL movies are meaningless. I only thought the movie I walked out on was meaningless. I wonder, then, if when people say life is meaningless, what they really mean is THEIR lives are meaningless.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“The boy's mother said he was autistic and sometimes spaced out, staring at his hands, but because I didn't know what autism was, really, I figured he was more or less mesmerized by his existence. I was romanticizing the situation because the kid was probably distracting himself or daydreaming or something, but I thought maybe he was like Hamlet looking at his hands, thinking sincerely about what it means to have been born.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“The most often repeated commandment in the Bible is “Do not fear.” It’s in there over two hundred times.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

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

“The most often repeated commandment in the Bible is “Do not fear.” It’s in there over two hundred times. That means a couple of things, if you think about it. It means we are going to be afraid, and it means we shouldn’t let fear boss us around.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“PERHAPS ONE OF the reasons I’ve avoided having a clear ambition is that second you stand up and point toward a horizon, you realize how much there is to lose. It’s always been this way.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“You can call it God or a conscience, or you can dismiss it as that intuitive knowing we all have as human beings, as living storytellers; but there is a knowing I feel that guides me toward better stories, toward being a better character.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“If I have a hope, it’s that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story, and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you.”
― 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.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life