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“You'd think God would come right out and tell us what to do in the Bible, but He doesn't. He mostly tells stories, and He rarely stops the story to say what the point is. He just lets the characters and conflict hang in the air like smoke.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“You get a feeling when you look back on life that all God really wants from us is to live inside a body He made, and enjoy the story, and to bond with Him through the experience.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“I realized that for years I'd thought of love as something that would complete me, make all my troubles go away. I worshipped at the altar of romantic completion. And it had cost me, plenty of times. ANd it had cost me most of the girls I'd dated, too, because I wanted them to be something they weren't. It's too much pressure to put on a person.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“Susan essentially said no. And she said that with her husband sitting right there in the audience. She said she and her husband believed they were a cherished prize for each other, and they would probably drive any other people mad. But then she said something I thought was wise. She said she had married a guy, and he was just a guy. He wasn’t going to make all her problems go away, because he was just a guy. And that freed her to really love him as a guy, not as an ultimate problem solver. And because her husband believed she was just a girl, he was free to really love her too. Neither needed the other to make everything okay. They were simply content to have good company through life’s conflicts. I thought that was beautiful. There”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“He said, “Don, when something hard happens to you, you have two choices in how to deal with it. You can either get bitter, or better. I chose to get better. It’s made all the difference.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“I didn’t want to need his affirmation. But part of our selves is spirit, and our spirits are thirsty, and my father’s words went into my spirit like water.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person’s story is about, just ask them what they want. If we don’t want anything, we are living boring stories, and if we want a Roomba vaccum cleaner, we are living stupid stories. If it won’t work in a story, it won’t work in life.”
― 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

“My uncle told a great story with his life, but I think there was such a sadness at his funeral because his story wasn't 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

“I wanted it to be an easy story. But nobody really remembers easy stories. Characters have to face their greatest fears with courage. That’s what makes a story good. If you think about the stories you like most, they probably have lots of conflict. There is probably death at stake, inner death or actual death, you know. These polar charges, these happy and sad things in life, are like colors God uses to draw the world.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“A general rule in creating stories is that characters don’t want to change. They must be forced to change.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“I guess what I am saying is, 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 people 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

“It’s interesting that in the Bible, in the book of Ecclesiastes, the only practical advice given about living a meaningful life is to find a job you like, enjoy your marriage, and obey God. It’s as though 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

“And that’s the first time I realized that the idea a character is what he does makes as much sense in life as it does in the movies. I thought about my friend’s story from his wife’s perspective. She only knows what he says and what he does, not what he thinks and what he feels. I’m sure his wife picked up on his newfound enthusiasm, but it did help me realize the stories we tell ourselves are very different from the stories we tell the world.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“The great tragedy of our lives seems to be that we are smart enough to ask the questions of meaning but too dumb to really figure it out.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“Maybe the reason we like stories so much is because they deliver wish fulfillment. Maybe we sit in the dark and shovel sugar into our mouths because in so many stories everything is made right, and we secretly long for that ourselves.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“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 work of the middle. At some point the shore behind you stops getting smaller, and you paddle and wonder why the same strokes that used to move you now only rock the boat. You got the wife, but you don't know if you like her anymore and you've only been married for five years. You want to wake up and walk into the living room in your underwear and watch football and let your daughters play with the dog because the far shore doesn't get closer no matter how hard you paddle.

The shore you left is just as distant, and there is no going back; there is only the decision to paddle in place or stop, slide out of the hatch, and sink into the sea. Maybe there's another story at the bottom of the sea. Maybe you don't have to be in this story anymore.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“I kept imagining these people, just living their daily lives, and then having them suddenly ended in unjust tragedy. When we watch the news, we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it. 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. We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“The truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won’t make a story meaningful, it won’t make a life meaningful either.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

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

“There is no conflict man can endure that will not produce a blessing.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“To know there is a better story for your life and to choose something other is like choosing to die.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“Life isn't memorable enough to remember everything. It's not like there are explosions all the time, or dog smoking cigarettes.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“No girl who plays the role of a hero dates a guy who uses her. She knows who she is. She just forgot for a little while.”
― 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. The next day, when I was walking with”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“I believe there is a writer outside ourselves, plotting a better story for us, interacting with us, even, and whispering a better story into our consciousness.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“After a tragedy, I think God gives us a period of numbing as a kind of grace. Perhaps he knows our small minds, given so easily to false hope, couldn't handle the full brunt of reality.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“the great stories go to those who don’t give in to fear.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“She only knows what he says and what he does, not what he thinks and what he feels.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“I wondered why nobody realized what a crazy experience we all were having. I'd be lying in bed, or walking down a hallway in college, and the realization that I was alive would startle me, as though it had come up from behind and slammed two books together. I suddenly realized I was breathing air and stuck to the planet and temporary. And that realization felt as though I had come from some other existence and was experiencing this magical life for the first time.

If you think about it, we get robbed of the mystery of being alive. It's a fairly amazing thing, you know. Even if you believe life is an accident, that we are all here by accident, it's still an amazing thing. It might even be a more amazing thing if we are really here by accident. What are the chances, honestly? Still, 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. Your brain doesn't stop growing until you turn 26, you know. So from birth to 26, God is slowly turning on the lights, and you are groggy and pointing at things and saying ‘circle� and ‘blue� and ‘car,� and then ‘sex� and ‘job� and ‘healthcare.� The experience is so slow, you can easily come to believe life isn't that big a deal, that life isn't staggering. What I'm saying is, I think life IS staggering, and we are just too used to it. We are all of us like spoiled children, no longer impressed with the gifts we are being given. It’s just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving over the mountains, just another child being born, just another funeral.

When I was writing myself into a movie, I felt the way God feels as he writes the world, sitting over the planets, placing tiny people in tiny wombs. If I have a hope, it’s that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me specifically into the story. And He put us in with the sunsets and 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