Quotes from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“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.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“Believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“I once listened to an Indian on television say that God was in the wind and the water, and I wondered at how beautiful that was because it meant you could swim in Him or have Him brush your face in a breeze.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“...sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself...”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“Dying for something is easy because it is associated with glory. Living for something is the hard thing. Living for something extends beyond fashion, glory, or recognition. We live for what we believe.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“ I will give you this, my love, and I will not bargain or barter any longer. I will love you, as sure as He has loved me. I will discover what I can discover and though you remain a mystery, save God's own knowledge, what I disclose of you I will keep in the warmest chamber of my heart, the very chamber where God has stowed Himself in me. And I will do this to my death, and to death it may bring me.
I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding you love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again.
God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“...to be in a relationship with God is to be loved purely and furiously. And a person who thinks himself unlovable cannot be in a relationship with God because he can't accept who God is; a Being that is love. We learn that we are lovable or unlovable from other people...That is why God tells us so many times to love each other.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“I always thought the Bible was more of a salad thing, you know, but it isn't. It's a chocolate thing.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: life is a story about me.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“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.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“I am something of a recluse by nature. I am that cordless screwdriver that has to charge for twenty hours to earn ten minutes use. I need that much downtime. ”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn't normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface. Other people keep our souls alive, just like food and water does with our body.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“...I want my spirituality to rid me of hate, not give me reason for it.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“If we are not willing to wake up in the morning and die to ourselves, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether or not we are really following Jesus.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“Everybody wants to be fancy and new. Nobody wants to be themselves. I mean, maybe people want to be themselves, but they want to be different, with different clothes or shorter hair or less fat. It's a fact. If there was a guy who just liked being himself and didn't want to be anybody else, that guy would be the most different guy in the world and everybody would want to be him.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“I think the things we want most in life, the things we think will set us free, are not the thing we need.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“What I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they're shy.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“I loved the fact that it wasn't my responsibility to change somebody, that it was God's, that my part was just to communicate love and approval.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“ALONE

One of my new housemates, Stacy, wants to write a story about an astronaut. In his story the astronaut is wearing a suit that keeps him alive by recycling his fluids. In the story the astronaut is working on a space station when an accident takes place, and he is cast into space to orbit the earth, to spend the rest of his life circling the globe. Stacy says this story is how he imagines hell, a place where a person is completely alone, without others and without God. After Stacy told me about his story, I kept seeing it in my mind. I thought about it before I went to sleep at night. I imagined myself looking out my little bubble helmet at blue earth, reaching toward it, closing it between my puffy white space-suit fingers, wondering if my friends were still there. In my imagination I would call to them, yell for them, but the sound would only come back loud within my helmet. Through the years my hair would grow long in my helmet and gather around my forehead and fall across my eyes. Because of my helmet I would not be able to touch my face with my hands to move my hair out of my eyes, so my view of earth, slowly, over the first two years, would dim to only a thin light through a curtain of thatch and beard.
I would lay there in bed thinking about Stacy's story, putting myself out there in the black. And there came a time, in space, when I could not tell whether I was awake or asleep. All my thoughts mingled together because I had no people to remind me what was real and what was not real. I would punch myself in the side to feel pain, and this way I could be relatively sure I was not dreaming. Within ten years I was beginning to breathe heavy through my hair and my beard as they were pressing tough against my face and had begun to curl into my mouth and up my nose. In space, I forgot that I was human. I did not know whether I was a ghost or an apparition or a demon thing.
After I thought about Stacy's story, I lay there in bed and wanted to be touched, wanted to be talked to. I had the terrifying thought that something like that might happen to me. I thought it was just a terrible story, a painful and ugly story. Stacy had delivered as accurate a description of a hell as could be calculated. And what is sad, what is very sad, is that we are proud people, and because we have sensitive egos and so many of us live our lives in front of our televisions, not having to deal with real people who might hurt us or offend us, we float along on our couches like astronauts moving aimlessly through the Milky Way, hardly interacting with other human beings at all.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“It comforts me to think that if we are created beings the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. It would have to be greater than the facts of our reality and so it would seem to us, looking out from within our reality that it would contradict reason. But reason itself would suggest it would have to be greater than reality or it would not be reasonable.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“They are lonely. I'm not talking about lonely for a lover or a friend. I mean lonely in the universal sense, lonely inside the understanding that we are tiny people on a tiny little earth suspended in an endless void that echoes past stars and stars of stars.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“When a relationship is right, it is no more possible to wake up and want out of the marriage than it is to wake up and stop believing in God. What is, is what is.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“At the end of the day, when I am lying in bed and I know the chances of any of our theology being exactly right are a million to one, I need to know that God has things figured out, that if my math is wrong we are still going to be okay. And wonder is that feeling we get when we let go of our silly answers, our mapped out rules that we want God to follow. I don't think there is any better worship than wonder.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“It was a haunting feeling, the sort of sensation you get when you wonder whether you are two people, the other of which does things you can't explain, bad and terrible things.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“I need for there to be something bigger than me. I need someone to put awe inside me; I need to come second to someone who has everything figured out.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again. God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

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