Keith Miller Quotes

Twilight is the hour I love,' he told her, 'the hour where nothing is quite itself, all things teetering at the edges of their names. Here I can be alone and a stranger to myself.

I've seen batting all over the world. And in other countries too

I learned that the purpose of the Twelve Steps is to do the will of God.

I was taught that pain is bad.

Pain is the doorway to wisdom and to truth.

I am discovering that in trying to find God's will and the shape of the Christian life I have begun an adventure so great that its total completion will always be ahead.

We can't be intimate because we can't share feelings that we don't have.

Beyond the stars you see are other stars, stars beyond stars,' she told him, 'and all are dreams, like shoals of fish in the oceans of the night.

I remember when I was a little boy my father didn't love me; he couldn't. He loved my older brother but he couldn't love me somehow, at least not in a way I could understand it.

We never look at the grass, though it is ubiquitous. If it's left alone to shake its hair loose it will produce tiny tassels and flowers, miniature and beautiful, that I'd never noticed before. Beauty is so often size and commotion for us, and fancy labels, that the subterfuge of loveliness all around us goes unseen.

A city of squalls, foggy mornings, intervals of blue and white so immaculate the eyes ached. A city of readers, coffee drinkers, kissers on sidewalks, sad faces at wet windows. A city of umbrellas, woolen scarves, raincoats, cigarettes, wineglasses, cognac.

...his favorite books, those he'd read over and over so he knew just the lurch his heart would make when he turned the page and encountered the illustration of the despondent dragon under a half-moon or the fervor with which he flipped the final pages of another, the story so vivid he felt his relationship with that book was less an act of reading than a visit, a place he went to.

Religious work is one of the best ways to keep from facing your reality if you are Christian, if you are using it to calm the pain, because that it what all addictions are, attempts to cover the pain of this spiritual disease.

We live in a constant fear that our shortcomings will be exposed to family, to friends and to the world.

A spiritual person is also in touch with his or her own reality, feelings and thoughts, and the reality of the people around him or her, not projecting on them.

Feelings are like a color chart that God has given us.

There never was a social change in America without angry people at the heart.

But keep characters in propinquity long enough and a story will always develop a plot.

I am too old to think.

Somewhere," he told her, "somewhere else lived a boy and a girl beside the sea and as they grew older they grew more transparent. At first blue blood vessels and then bones bloomed beneath the skin but soon they could see the shapes of the world behind their bodies, the shudder of leaves like shadows in the brain, a butterfly's flutter in the mutter of the heart, beetles in the coils of the bowels. They watched wine whirl down each other's throats and the sun rise up each other's spines, stepping vertically vertebra to vertebra. Soon the only substance they obtained was when their bodies overlapped and so they clasped each other, peering for the vestiges of eyes, teeth, ears, smears against the landscape. And one day they kissed and disappeared.

If God is in a life, it doesn't have to be big to be happy and to be important in His kingdom.

The way to love someone is to lightly run your finger over that person's soul until you find a crack, and then gently pour your love into that crack.

We are a nation of people who are afraid we are not enough.

The writing of poetry is a chancy business, it's currency solitude and loss, its tools coffee and too much wine, its hours midnight, dawn, and dusk, and unlike other trade the hours asleep are not time off.

I am six feet tall. I am not supposed to be afraid.

Stories are life," protested Pico. "Without them, books would be only paper and ink, with them they breathe, the reader is drawn in, the stories become him.

All I have to tell you about is what I have heard and seen of Jesus, how He is helping me find freedom, to occasionally love other people, and even accept myself with all my mixed motives.

Intimacy, as I am using it, is sharing my reality with you.

You are controlling because I want you to do it, not because of the situation or what needs to be done.

Memories must enter the bloodstream, must churn awhile through the heart's mill, must be crushed and polished, be nearly forgotten or cling like burs to other stories before they spill forth in purple patterns, shapes of small bones and worm rot, shapes of clouds and the spaces between leaves.

I have learned to like myself for the first time and to have some serenity.

Reading is the strangest art. Your eye takes a shape, turns it into music, then story, then spirit, so a curl of ink laid long ago by a sliver of reed can become, a thousand years later, your own breath.

No gentleman ever discusses any relationship with a lady.

Beneath all of these addictions is this disease, this control disease which is the mark of our society.

A lot of us have jobs where we need to give people structure but that is different from controlling.

I grew up and I became very successful at what I did as a young man. I became a work addict because this was the only way I could get any relief from this pain.

In trying to commit my life to finding and participating in some of the purposes of Christ, as I can determine them, my energies and abilities are gradually being focused and are working together.

I wrote a book called The Taste of New Wine because I couldn't find a book that talked about the reality of the situation and how we were dishonest and afraid.

He went to sleep as soon as they'd gone, waking in the middle of the night and walking outside into a sky whose stars hung so low he felt he strolled among them and he could see indeed, so clear the air, the very flames of their inner workings.

Conversations in the flesh are the first drafts toward the later conversations of the mind, where words and ideas are sorted and elaborated, recast.

My only hope to receive love is to let you see who I am, then I may believe you.

And he loves to read. He loves the whisper of the pages and the way his fingertips catch on rough paper, the pour of the words up from the leaves, through the soft light, into his eyes, the mute voice in his ears.

A Christian marriage is [not] one with no problems or even a marriage with fewer problems. (It may well mean more problems.) But it does mean a life in which two people are able to accept each other and love each other in the midst of problems and fears. It means a marriage in which selfish people can accept selfish people without constantly trying to change them
and even accept themselves, because they realize personally that they have been accepted by Christ.