Scary Close Quotes

“Sometimes the story we’re telling the world isn’t half as endearing as the one that lives inside us.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“But love doesn’t control, and I suppose that’s why it’s the ultimate risk. In the end, we have to hope the person we’re giving our heart to won’t break it, and be willing to forgive them when they do, even as they will forgive us. Real love stories don’t have dictators, they have participants. Love is an ever-changing, complicated, choose-your-own adventure narrative that offers the world but guarantees nothing.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“I no longer believe love works like a fairy tale but like farming. Most of it is just getting up early and tilling the soil and then praying for rain. But if we do the work, we just might wake up one day to find an endless field of crops rolling into the horizon. In my opinion, that’s even better than a miracle. I’d rather earn the money than win the lottery because there’s no joy in a reward unless it comes at the end of a story.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“I don’t know if there’s a healthier way for two people to stay in love than to stop using each other to resolve their unfulfilled longings and, instead, start holding each other closely as they experience them.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“I am willing to sound dumb. I am willing to be wrong. I am willing to be passionate about something that isn’t perceived as cool. I am willing to express a theory. I am willing to admit I’m afraid. I’m willing to contradict something I’ve said before. I’m willing to have a knee-jerk reaction, even a wrong one. I’m willing to apologize. I’m perfectly willing to be perfectly human.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“Grace only sticks to our imperfections. Those who can’t accept their imperfections can’t accept grace either.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“It costs personal fear to be authentic but the reward is integrity, and by that I mean a soul fully integrated, no difference between his act and his actual person. Having integrity is about being the same person on the inside that we are on the outside, and if we don’t have integrity, life becomes exhausting.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“Here are two things I found taking the long road, though: Applause is a quick fix. And love is an acquired taste.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“It’s a beautiful moment when somebody wakes up to this reality, when they realize God created them so other people could enjoy them, not just endure them.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“Remarkably, the most common regret of the dying was this: they wish they’d had the courage to live a life true to themselves and not the life others expected of them.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“It’s all connected with the belief human love is conditional. But human love isn’t conditional. No love is conditional. If love is conditional, it’s just some sort of manipulation masquerading as love.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“I began to wonder what life would be like if I dropped the act and began to trust that being myself would be enough to get the love I needed.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“I'm perfectly willing to be perfectly human.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy

“I DON’T KNOW WHY IT IS, EXACTLY, BUT THE PEOPLE with the healthiest self-esteem are also the greatest at intimacy. I’m not talking about arrogant people. I’m talking about people who know they are both good and bad yet believe at the deepest level they are really good for people. It’s a beautiful moment when somebody wakes up to this reality, when they realize God created them so other people could enjoy them, not just endure them.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“But love doesn’t control, and I suppose that’s why it’s the ultimate risk. In the end, we have to hope the person we’re giving our heart to won’t break it, and be willing to forgive them when they do, even as they will forgive us. Real love stories don’t have dictators, they have participants. Love is an ever-changing, complicated, choose-your-own adventure narrative that offers the world but guarantees nothing. When you climb a mountain or sail an ocean, you’re rewarded for staying in control. Perhaps that’s another reason true intimacy is so frightening. It’s the one thing we all want, and must give up control to get.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy

“A group therapist created a terrific visual example of what a healthy relationship looks like. She put three pillows on the floor and asked a couple of us to stand on the pillows. She told us to leave the middle pillow open. She pointed at my pillow and said, "Don, that's your pillow, that's your life. The only person who gets to step on that pillow is you. Nobody else. That's your territory, your soul." Then she pointed at my friend's pillow and told her that was her pillow, that she owned it and it was her soul. Then, the therapist said, the middle pillow symbolized the relationship. She said that both of us could step into the middle pillow any time we wanted because we'd agreed to be in a relationship. However, she said, at no point is it appropriate to step on the other person's pillow. What goes on in the other person's soul is none of your business. All you're responsible for is your soul, nobody else's. Regarding the middle pillow, the question to ask is, "What do I want in a relationship?" If the pillow you two step on together works, that's great. If not, move on or simply explain what you'd like life to feel like in the middle pillow and see if the other person wants that kind of relationship too. But never, she said, ever try to change each other. Know who you are and know what you want in a relationship, and give people the freedom to be themselves.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy

“We don’t think of our flaws as the glue that binds us to the people we love, but they are. Grace only sticks to our imperfections. Those who can’t accept their imperfections can’t accept grace either.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“Be encouraged. Your heart is writing a poem on the world and it’s being turned into a thousand songs.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“God is going to reveal me as a flawed human being as fast as he can and he’s going to enjoy it because it will force me to grapple with real intimacy.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“when the story of earth is told, all that will be remembered is the truth we exchanged. The vulnerable moments. The terrifying risk of love and the care we took to cultivate it. And all the rest, the distracting noises of insecurity and the flattery and the flashbulbs will flicker out like a turned-off television.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“Love can’t be earned, it can only be given. And it can only be exchanged by people who are completely true with each other.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“A good story makes you thankful to be alive because it reminds you that while sometimes painful, life is indeed beautiful and even magical.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“So I wrote. I wrote as though God thought my voice mattered. I wrote because I believed a human story was beautiful, no matter how small the human was. I wrote because I didn’t make myself, God did. And I wrote like he’d invited me to share my true “self” with the world.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“The reality is people are impressed with all kinds of things: intelligence, power, money, charm, talent, and so on. But the ones we tend to stay in love with are, in the long run, the ones who do a decent job loving us back.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“Almost without exception the most beautiful, selfless people I’ve met are ones who’ve experienced personal tragedy.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“It’s true: if we live behind a mask we can impress but we can’t connect.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“They never tell you when you get born a control freak it will cost you a healthy love life. But it’s true. You can’t control somebody and have intimacy with them at the same time. They may stay because they fear you, but true love casts out fear.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“I don’t trust people to accept who I am in process. I’m the kind of person who wants to present my most honest, authentic self to the world—so I hide backstage and rehearse honest and authentic lines until the curtain opens.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“I LIKE WHAT THE DANCER MARTHA GRAHAM ONCE said, that each of us is unique and if we didn’t exist something in the world would have been lost. I wonder, then, why we are so quick to conform—and what the world has lost because we have. William Blake said about Jesus that he was “all virtue and acted from impulse, not from rules.” If we are to be like him, aren’t we to speak and move and do, to act upon the world and take new ground from the forces that work against our unique genius and beauty? What if part of God’s message to the world was you? The true and real you?”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“I’ve come to believe a person’s love for you can’t grow unless you hold that person loosely.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy