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"We were made to be distracted by life, by story."
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"What so tedious as a twice-told tale?"
"Socially interacting with a storyteller can be a frustrating challenge because a portion of her awareness is constantly sorting through the details of a developing book. And while you may successfully engage in a meaningful conversation with her, an additional part of her mind is frantically sifting through descriptive lines to be used if ever she were to write this exchange down. The trouble with writers is that they are ALWAYS writing!"
"Far more often [than asking the question 'Is it true?'] they [children] have asked me: 'Was he good? Was he wicked?' That is, they were far more concerned to get the Right side and the Wrong side clear. For that is a question equally important in History and in Faerie."
"To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a new whereby to catch something else."
"The world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."
"That's the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to it's logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies."
"This is how deeply rooted stories are, folks. We crave them before we can walk, and we start telling them before we can talk."
"As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper."
"All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.All of them?Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist."
"If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be."
Explore more quotes by 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."
"To know there is a better story for your life and to choose something other is like choosing to die."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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