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.

THE SEASONS REMIND ME THAT I MUST KEEP CHANGING.

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.

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.

Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.

_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.

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.

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.

Relationships unlock certain parts of who we are supposed to be.

When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.

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.

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.

Sunday morning church service is not an enormous priority spending time with other believers is.

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.

Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they're shy.

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.

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.

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.