Donald Miller

Life isn't memorable enough to remember everything. It's not like there are explosions all the time, or dog smoking cigarettes.

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.

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.

God allows us to face the tension whether we like it or not.

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.

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.

The root systems of these lies we tell ourselves tend to grow together. It__ all connected with the belief human love is conditional. But human love isn__ conditional. No love is conditional. If love is conditional, it__ just some sort of manipulation masquerading as love.

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.

In church, the rules of the lifeboat don't apply. Church is the refuge where the Kingdom of God is emulated, not mocked.

Anybody who wants to get their way says that Jesus supports their view. But that isn't Jesus' fault.

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.

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.

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.

He captures memories because if he forgets them, it's as though they didn't happen.

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.

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.

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

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.