Donald Miller quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Donald Miller has a lot to say. In this list we present the 109 best Donald Miller quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
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Donald Miller quotes
I will give you this, my love, and I will not bargain or barter any longer. I will love you, as sure as He has loved me. I will discover what I can discover and though you remain a mystery, save God’s own knowledge, what I disclose of you I will keep in the warmest chamber of my heart, the very chamber where God has stowed Himself in me. And I will do this to my death, and to death it may bring me. I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding you love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again. God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought. They can’t see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their spouses, and they go looking for an easier story.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
And if these mountains had eyes, they would wake to find two strangers in their fences, standing in admiration as a breathing red pours its tinge upon earth’s shore. These mountains, which have seen untold sunrises, long to thunder praise but stand reverent, silent so that man’s weak praise should be given God’s attention.
— Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road
Writers don’t make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible. But then again we don’t work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon then go downstairs and make coffee, fry some eggs, read the paper, read part of a book, smell the book, wonder if perhaps we ourselves should work on our book, smell the book again, throw the book across the room because we are quite jealous that any other person wrote a book, feel terribly guilty about throwing the schmuck’s book across the room because we secretly wonder if God in heaven noticed our evil jealousy, or worse, our laziness. We then lie across the couch facedown and mumble to God to forgive us because we are secretly afraid He is going to dry up all our words because we envied another man’s stupid words. And for this, as I said, we are paid a dollar. We are worth so much more.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.After that I liked jazz music.Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
I once listened to an Indian on television say that God was in the wind and the water, and I wondered at how beautiful that was because it meant you could swim in Him or have Him brush your face in a breeze.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me
— Donald Miller
It comforts me to think that if we are created beings the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. It would have to be greater than the facts of our reality and so it would seem to us, looking out from within our reality that it would contradict reason. But reason itself would suggest it would have to be greater than reality or it would not be reasonable.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
Today I wonder why it is God refers to Himself as ‘Father’ at all. This, to me, in light of the earthly representation of the role, seems a marketing mistake.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
If you dont love somebody, it gets annoying if they tell you what to do or what to feel. When you love them, you get pleasure from their pleasure nad it makes it easy to serve. I didnt love God because i didnt know God. universe is not effected by time. Light exists outside of time.. It is still a mystery to physicists.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
Christian spirituality was not a children’s story. It wasn’t cute or neat. It was mystical and odd and clean, and it was reaching into dirty. There was wonder in it and enchantment.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn’t mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It’s a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them.
— 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 can like them for who they are.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
Relationships unlock certain parts of who we are supposed to be.
— Donald Miller
I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding.
— Donald Miller, To Own a Dragon: Reflections on Growing Up Without a Father
…more than a half million books, all of them smelling like dust and ink, two terrible smells that blend mystically to make something beautiful. Powells is another church to me, a paperback sort of heaven.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
Fear is 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
I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy’s notion of his father.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
THE SEASONS REMIND ME THAT I MUST KEEP CHANGING.
— Donald Miller
All this beauty exists so you and I can see His glory, His artwork. It’s like an invitation to worship Him, to know Him.
— Donald Miller, To Own a Dragon: Reflections on Growing Up Without a Father
It was a haunting feeling, the sort of sensation you get when you wonder whether you are two people, the other of which does things you can’t explain, bad and terrible things.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
…burying themselves in his arm was more about feeling his love in the confusion, in the difficulty, than it was about having moved past it.
— Donald Miller, To Own a Dragon: Reflections on Growing Up Without a Father
But playing your music as loud as you want and coming home drunk aren’t real life. Real life, it turns out, is diapers and lawnmowers, decks that need painting, a wife that needs to be listened to, kids that need to be taught right from wrong, a checkbook, an oil change, a sunset behind a mountain, laughter at a kitchen table, too much wine, a chipped tooth, and a screaming child.
— Donald Miller, To Own a Dragon: Reflections on Growing Up Without a Father
I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
It occurs to me it is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless.
— Donald Miller
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
Reality is like a fine wine, ” he said to me. “It will not appeal to children.
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good…The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
The trouble with deep belief is that it costs something And there is something inside me, some selfish beast of a subtle thing that doesn’t like the truth at all because it carries responsibility, and if I actually believe these things I have to do something about them. It is so, so cumbersome to believe anything. And it isn’t cool.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
You can’t memorize poetry and stay a fake. Sooner or later, you start to understand what these poets are saying, and it makes you feel life has something quite special, with certain layers of meaning to it.
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
This message God was communicating to mankind, this Gospel of Jesus, was a message to the heart as much as to the head, that the methodology was as important as the message itself, that the message could not be presented accurately outside of the emotions within which these truths were embedded.
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
A person could read the Bible, not to become smart, but rather to feel that they are not alone, that somebody understands them and love them enough to speak to them, on purpose, in a way that makes a person feel human.
— Donald Miller
I liked this God very much because you hardly had to talk to it and it never talked back. Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
— Donald Miller
Life is a dance toward God, I began to think. And the dance is not so graceful as we might want. While we glide and swing out practiced sway, God crowds our feet, bumps our toes, and scuffs our shoes. So we learn to dance with the One who made us. And it is a difficult dance to learn, because its steps are foreign.
— Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road
The separation of truth from reason is a dangerous game. I think ideas have to sink very deeply into a person’s soul, into their being, before they can effect change.
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
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
At the time, I didn’t know what forgiveness meant. I wouldn’t really know what forgiveness meant for another year, until my pastor, Rick McKinley, happened to spell it out in a sermon. He said that when you forgive, you bear the burden somebody has given you without holding them accountable.
— Donald Miller, To Own a Dragon: Reflections on Growing Up Without a Father
The human body essentially recreates itself 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 last November.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
Anybody who wants to get their way says that Jesus supports their view. But that isn’t Jesus’ fault.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
I think that’s why so many couples fight, because they want their partners to validate them and affirm them, and if they don’t get that, they feel as though they’re going to die. And so they lash out. But it’s a terrible thing to wake up and realize the person you just finished crucifying wasn’t Jesus.
— Donald Miller
In church, the rules of the lifeboat don’t apply. Church is the refuge where the Kingdom of God is emulated, not mocked.
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
When you build a city near no mountains and no ocean, you get materialism and traditional religion. People have too much time and lack inspiration.
— Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road
The root systems of these lies we tell ourselves tend to grow together. 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 Finding True Intimacy
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
Sometimes when I watch my dog, I think about how good life can be, if we only lose ourselves in our stories. Lucy doesn’t read self-help books about how to be a dog; she just IS a dog. All she wants to do is chase ducks and sticks and do other things that make both her and me happy. It makes me wonder if that was the intention for man, to chase sticks and ducks, to name animals, to create families, and to keep looking back at God to feed off his pleasure at our pleasure.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
God allows us to face the tension whether we like it or not.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
It is always the simple things that change our lives. And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen. Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll. This is how God does things.
— Donald Miller
Perhaps one of the reasons I’ve avoided standing on the point toward the horizon is the second you stand up and point toward a horizon, you realize how much there is to lose.
— 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
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
What good does it do to tell somebody to live morally so they can die 50 years later and apparently go to Hell?
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
He thought about the story his daughter was living and the role she was playing inside that story. He realized he hadn’t provided a better role for his daughter. He hadn’t mapped out a story for his family. And so his daughter had chosen another story, a story in which she was wanted, even if she was only being used. In the absence of a family story, she’d chosen a story in which there was risk and adventure, rebellion and independence.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
I never thought to ascribe my mother’s emotional and physical exhaustion to the lack of a husband and father; rather, I ascribed it to my existence. In other words, I grew up learning the exact opposite of what Eisenhower was taught. I learned that if I didn’t exist, the family would be better off. I grew up believing that if I had never been born, things would be easier for the people I loved. (page 35)
— Donald Miller, Father Fiction: Chapters for a Fatherless Generation
Dwight Eisenhower said that from the beginning, his mother and father operated on an assumption that set the course of his life – that the world could be fixed of its problems if every child understood the necessity of their existence. Eisenhower’s parents assumed, and taught their children, that if their children weren’t alive, their family couldn’t function. (page 34)
— Donald Miller, Father Fiction: Chapters for a Fatherless Generation
(The monks) approach was far less narcissistic and our tends to be. Their goal when reading Scripture was to see Christ in every verse, and not a mirror image of themselves.
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
Because it is so scatterbrained and has absolutely no charts and graphs, I’m actually quite surprised the Bible sells.
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
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
The mountains themselves call us into greater stories.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
I listened so hard because it felt like, while she was telling me stories, she was massaging my soul, letting me know that I was not alone, that I will never have to be alone, that there are friends and family and churches and coffee shops. I was not going to be cast into space.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
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
You don’t realize your story is changing you until you look back.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
I don’t wonder anymore what I’ll tell God when I go to heaven when we sit in the chairs under the tree, outside the city……..I’ll tell these things to God, and he’ll laugh, I think and he’ll remind me of the parts I forgot, the parts that were his favorite. We’ll sit and remember my story together, and then he’ll stand and put his arms around me and say, “well done, ” and that he liked my story. And my soul won’t be thirsty anymore. Finally he’ll turn and we’ll walk toward the city, a city he will have spoken into existence a city built in a place where once there’d been nothing.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
I asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it means to be a tree in that story.
— 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
I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story, which is why the elements of story made sense in the first place.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
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
…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 actual language of life is not the charts and graphs and stuff we map out to feel smart. The hidden language we are speaking is really about negotiating the feeling God used to give us.
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
The downside of being a writer is you get plenty of time to overthink your life.
— Donald Miller
All our time spent making lists would be better spent painting, or writing, Or singing, or learning to speak stories. Sometimes I feel as though the Church has a kind of pity for Scripture, Always having to come behind it and explain everything, put everything into actionable steps, acronyms and hidden secrets, as though the original writers, and for that matter the Holy Spirit Who worked in the lives of the original writers, were a bunch of you literate hillbillies. I think the methodology God used to explain His Truth is quite superior. My life is a story, more than a list. I don’t feel that a list could ever explain the complexity of all this beauty.
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
Jesus had no regard for the lifeboat politics you and I live within every day.
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
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
It wasn’t necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again. God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.
— 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
I lay there under the stars and thought of what a great responsibility it is to be human.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
The repentance we are called to is about choosing one audience over another.
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
About the time I told God that He didn’t exist, I was desperate for an identity.
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
A big part of me needed something outside myself to tell me who I was. The thing that had been designed to tell me who I was was gone.
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
I’m perfectly willing to be perfectly human.
— Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy
All relationships are teleological, are going somewhere.
— Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy
For a long time, I thought I was good at relationships because I was charming.
— Donald Miller
Paul was terribly personal. The books I like are the ones that make you feel like you are with a person who is being quite vulnerable, telling you all sorts of stuff that is personal, and that’s the thing Paul did that makes me like him.
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
If the Gospel of Jesus is relational, that is, if our brokenness will be fixed not by our understanding of theology but by God telling us who we are, then this would require a kind of intimacy of which only Heaven knows.
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
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
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
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
Just out of high school, you didn’t realize you were creating drama for the sake of drama.
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
The reason stories have dramatic tension is because LIFE has dramatic tension.
— 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
When I walked into the Christian section of a bookstore, the message was clear: Faith is something you do alone. Rick does not have much tolerance for people living alone. He’s like Bill Clinton in that he feels everyone’s pain. If Rick thinks somebody is lonely, he can’t sleep at night. He wants us all to live with each other and play nice so he can get some rest. Tortured soul.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
The problem is this: those of us who are never satisfied with our accomplishments secretly believe nobody will love us unless we’re perfect.
— Donald Miller
I learned that true love turns the other cheek, does not take a wrong into account, loves all people regardless of their indifference or hostility.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
…the words alone, lonely, and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language…those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
What if part of God’s message to the world was you, the true and real you?
— Donald Miller
If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He’s a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn’t change, the story hasn’t happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just condensed version of life then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another.
— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
People assume when you’re swimming in a river you are supposed to know which way you are going, and I guess some of the time that is true, but there are certain currents that are very strong, and it’s when we are in those currents we need somebody to come along, pull us out, and guide us in a safer direction. (page 18)
— Donald Miller, Father Fiction: Chapters for a Fatherless Generation
When one of my friends becomes a Christian, which happens about every 10 years because I am a sheep about sharing my faith, the experience is euphoric. I see in their eyes the trueness of the story.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
Life no longer felt meaningless. It felt stressful and terrifying, but it definitely didn’t feel meaningless.
— 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
All this gave way to my first encounter with guilt, which is still something entirely inscrutable to me, as if aliens were sending transmissions from another planet, telling me there is a right and a wrong in the universe.
— Donald Miller
I bring this up because in writing some thoughts about a father, or not having a father, I feel as though I’m writing a book about a troll under a bridge or a dragon. For me, a father was nothing more than a character in a fairy tale. I know fathers are not like dragons because fathers actually exist. I have seen them on television and sliding their arms around their wives in grocery stores, and I have seen them in the malls and in the coffee shops, but these were characters in other people’s stories. The sad thing is, as a kid, I wondered why I couldn’t have a dragon, but I never wondered why I didn’t have a father. (page 20)
— Donald Miller, Father Fiction: Chapters for a Fatherless Generation
Sometimes the things we want most in life are the things that will kill us.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
The only appropriate war rhetoric is more rhetoric that calls our enemies spirits and people with flesh the victims of this war. Satan wants us to fight with one another, and I understand that some evil must be restrained, but our war, the war of the ones who believe in Jesus, is a war unseen. If we could muster a portion of the patriotism we feel toward our earthly nations into patriotism and bravery in concert with the kingdom of God, the enemy would take fewer casualties.
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
Author Toni Morrison swats aside other possible sources of her success and says that the ONLY reason she is a great writer is because when she walked into a room as a child her father’s face lit up.
— Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What
I think if you like somebody you have to tell them. It might be embarrassing to say it, but you will never regret stepping up. I know from personal experience, however, that you should not keep telling a girl that you like her after she tells you she isn’t into it. You should not keep riding your bike by her house either.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they’re shy.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
Sunday morning church service is not an enormous priority spending time with other believers is.
— Donald Miller
Meaning is something we experience more than we attain. It’s like finding a nice, easy current in a river that carries you through life.
— Donald Miller
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