Donald Miller Quotes

People are the story they tell themselves.

As human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by — so you’d better be careful what stories you tell yourself.

You can't write something actively trying to please everyone - you're going to end up with watery soup that way. You just have to write stories you would want to read and hope that people like them.

A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

Sometimes the story we're telling the world isn't half as endearing as the one that lives inside us.

I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.

We tell specific stories about ourselves to ourselves and we're all the heroes of our own lives. But you live through certain experiences with other people, and sometimes they have very different takes on what happened.

Your positions on EVERYTHING are based on the story you tell yourself and not some universal fact from the universal fact database.

We try to create this interesting appearance to make ourselves feel better about ourselves.

We all have stories we're living and telling ourselves.

People who experience themselves as authentic are also experiencing themselves as myth, but that's not the narrative they're going with.

Any story that you tell about yourself causes suffering. There is no authentic story.

The ‘equilibrium’ that people see in me is really an illusion. I am as flawed as anyone. It’s only that I seem to have the knack of hiding.

it is a curious fact, but one which all experience owns, that people do not desire so much to appear better, as to appear different from what they really are.

We are not strangers to ourselves, we only try to be.

I know that people have different ways to see me but I'm used to it.

You can tell other people all the alibis you want. I don't mind. But to yourself try to be honest.

I have trouble actually describing myself because I'm always suspicious of people who start describing themselves. I'm like, "OK, why are you trying to tell me what you are?"

A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.

If I pretend to myself that I'm different from the way I truly am, I'm going to make choices that won't make me happy.

What you are you do not see, what you see is your shadow.

Our stories about our own lives are a form of fiction, I began to see and become more insistent as we grow older, even as we try to make them come out in some other way.

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves.

I may not get the opportunity to make movies for my whole life, but I'm going to make movies for the rest of my life. Maybe studios won't pay for it, but I'm going to do it because I love it. So, I just have to be proud of what I make, and what I'm trying to say in what I make. If people don't like it or people don't see it, that's beyond what I can control. I'm a storyteller, and people are going to listen or not and like it or not. That's only solidified over time.