Donald Miller Quotes
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I posted the first three chapters and I had enough people say that chapter two was dragging that I cut it out just before the book went to press. And I'm glad I did. The book is a lot better without it.
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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.
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Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.
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You never question the truth of something until you have to explain it to a skeptic.
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It is worthy of note that the Chinese and Japanese characters for money and gold are the same.
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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.
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Book of Ecclesiastes, God is saying... Write a good story, take somebody with you and let me help.
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The times in my life when I have been most happy haven't been the times when I have had the most money or the most freedom or the most anything, but rather when I've been in love or in community or right with people.
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It wasn't necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.
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Robert McKee says humans naturally seek comfort and stability. Without an inciting incident that disrupts their comfort, they won’t enter into a story. They have to get fired from their job or be forced to sign up for a marathon. A ring has to be purchased. A home has to be sold. The character has to jump into the story, into the discomfort and the fear, otherwise the story will never happen.
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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.
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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 your imperfections.
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People who live great stories know failure isn’t a judgment, it’s an education.
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There are things you cannot understand, and you must learn to live with this. Not only must you learn to live with this, you must learn to enjoy this.
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I often learn more about myself from listening to the life story of a friend than I do reflecting on my own story.
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I tend to write first drafts that are incredibly cognitive, very rational, very boring. They come off as justification. Like, 'This is my idea and here's all the reasons that it's right.' It doesn't make for very compelling reading.
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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.
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I should have people around bugging me and getting under my skin because without people I could not grow - I could not grow in God, and I could not grow as a human.
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Your life is a blank page. You write on it.
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And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it.
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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.
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A story is a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.
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He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.
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I have sometimes wondered if the greatest desire of man is to be known and loved anyway.