A Million Miles in a Million Years by Donald Miller
Book Summary by Jess Martin
What I'm saying is I think life is staggering and we're just used to it. We all are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we're given – it's just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral. Pg. 58
Story is a character who want something and overcomes conflict to get it. Pg 48
If I have a hope, it's that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story, and put us in with the sunset in the rainstorm as though to say, Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you. Pg. 59
And once you know what it takes to live a better story, you don't have a choice. Not living a better story would be like deciding to die, deciding to walk around until you die, and it's not natural to want to die. Pg. 66
A character is what he does. Pg. 72
And I found myself wanting even better stories. That's the thing you realize when you organize your life and the structure of the story. You'll get a taste for one story and then one another, and then another, and the stories were billed until you're living a kind of epic of risk and reward, and the whole thing will be molding you into the actual character whose rolls you've been playing. And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can't go back to being normal; you can't go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time. The more practice stories I lived, the more I want an epic to climb inside of and see through till its end. Pg. 155
And if your friends are living boring stories, you probably will too. We teach our children good or bad stories, what is worth living for and what it's worth dying for, what it's worth pursuing, and the dignity with which a character engages his own narrative. Pg. 160
In the end, my girlfriend and I put too much pressure on each other because we both thought the other person was Jesus. Pg. 190
Suffering, as absurd as it seemed, pointed to a greater story in which, if one would only construe himself as a character within, he could find fulfillment in this tragic role, knowing the plot was heading toward redemption. Pg. 196