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"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."
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"The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."

"He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears."

"You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me."

"Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it."

"If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul."

"We shouldn't have got married, really. Shouldn't have got married. Too young. Not ready for it."

"Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger."

"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."

"You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else."
Explore more quotes by Donald Miller

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Life no longer felt meaningless. It felt stressful and terrifying, but it definitely didn't feel meaningless."

"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."

"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."

"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."
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