Good Company

as an english minor, i spend a great deal of time each semester reading novels, short stories, essays, poems, memoirs, etc. this usually results in two things. one, i become increasingly educated and cultured. two, i exhaust my passion for, even interest in, literature and swear off reading for the rest of my days. fortunately, this sentiment usually wears off as the summer months wear on, which is what has finally happened over the past few weeks. yesterday, i finished don miller's book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. without sounding too much like a 15-year-old girl who just read 'the notebook' for the first time and decided true love is, in fact, her life calling, i have to admit miller's narrative has opened my eyes--widened my gaze on how rich life can be, how deep we can live. read it!

"When Steve, Ben and I wrote our characters into the screenplay, I felt the way I hope God feels as he writes the world, sitting over the planets and placing tiny people in tiny wombs. 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 and 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."

"People who live good stories are too busy to write about them. Nobody even strapped a typewriter to the back of an elephant and wrote a novel while hunting wild game. Nobody except for Hemingway. But let's not talk about Hemingway."

"It made me think about the hard lives so many people have had, the sacrifices they've endured, and how those people will see heaven differently from those of us who have had easier lives."

"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."

"I asked Bob what was the key to living such a great story, and Bob seemed uncomfortable with the idea he was anything special. But he wanted to answer my question, so he thought about it and said he didn't think we should be afraid to embrace whimsy. I asked him what meant by whimsy, and he struggled to define it. He said it's that nagging idea that life could be magical; it could be special id we were only willing to take a few risks."

"A good movie has memorable scenes, and so does a good life...We have to force ourselves to create these scenes. We have to get up off the couch and turn the television off, we have to blow up the inner-tubes and head to the river. We have to write the poem and deliver it in person. We have to pull the car off the road and hike to the top of the hill. We have to put on our suits, we have to dance at weddings."