Top 50 Keith Miller Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Keith Miller

2. “A forest is mystery but the desert is truth. Life pared to the bone.”

— Keith Miller

3. “This is the year of expansion in the Kingdom of God! Tent pegs will span to the north, the south, the east, and the west in the realm of revelation in the dominion of the Kingdom, where you will walk in a greater dimension of the manifestation of the Kingdom for your life!”

— Keith Miller

4. “I am six feet tall. I am not supposed to be afraid.”

— Keith Miller

5. “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.”

— Keith Miller

6. “We can’t be intimate because we can’t share feelings that we don’t have.”

— Keith Miller

7. “No gentleman ever discusses any relationship with a lady.”

— Keith Miller

8. “The problem is that this speeded-up life and stress in America causes us to cut off our feelings, so we are out of touch with our reality.”

— Keith Miller

9. “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.”

— Keith Miller

10. “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.”

— Keith Miller

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

— Keith Miller

12. “He skims over the sea weeping, the last winged man, salt water falling to salt water. And though he tries to flee his tears, the sea itself is all the tears of those who’ve ever wept. Even the sea, even the sundering sea will not set the sad poet apart, for the country of sorrows is the size of the heart.”

— Keith Miller

13. “Our tremendous drive for social acceptance and toward conformity in our time is causing us to train our children to be a generation of young liars who do not even realise they are lying. We train our children to be subtly dishonest almost from the crib. “Shh... don’t cry in front of all these people.”

— Keith Miller

14. “Pain is the doorway to wisdom and to truth.”

— Keith Miller

15. “What happens is that people who are very religious but who are not in touch with reality, cannot be spiritual.”

— Keith Miller

16. “We religious controllers control in the name of Jesus and it is really painful to people.”

— Keith Miller

17. “The whole Bible is the story of men and women trying to get back to God, to overcome that sin with sacrifices, good works, sermons, prophesy, witnessing, giving all kinds of things. It never worked.”

— Keith Miller

18. “The primary symptom of a controller is denial, that is I can’t see its symptoms in myself.”

— Keith Miller

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

— Keith Miller

20. “Prayer no longer seems like an activity to me; it has become the continuing language of the relationship I believe God designed to fulfill a human life.”

— Keith Miller

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

— Keith Miller

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

— Keith Miller

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

— Keith Miller

24. “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.”

— Keith Miller

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

— Keith Miller

26. “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.”

— Keith Miller

27. “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.”

— Keith Miller

28. “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.”

— Keith Miller

29. “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.”

— Keith Miller

30. “I was taught that pain is bad.”

— Keith Miller

31. “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.”

— Keith Miller

32. “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.”

— Keith Miller

33. “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.”

— Keith Miller

34. “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.”

— Keith Miller

35. “I’ve seen batting all over the world. And in other countries too.”

— Keith Miller

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

— Keith Miller

37. “I am deeply a part of the problem for which Christ died.”

— Keith Miller

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

— Keith Miller

39. “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.”

— Keith Miller

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

— Keith Miller

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

— Keith Miller

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

— Keith Miller

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

— Keith Miller

44. “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 soft light, into his eyes, the mute voice in his ears.”

— Keith Miller

Featured in: Reading Quotes

45. “I am too old to think.”

— Keith Miller

46. “It may seem an easy task to disregard a secret but secrets are like splinters beneath the flesh, the infection spreads and spreads and then the limb turns gangrenous and must be sawn away, all for the sake of a sliver of wood.”

— Keith Miller

47. “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.”

— Keith Miller

48. “Each and every one of you has a vision or a dream to live out. But God doesn’t expect you to do it in your ability.”

— Keith Miller

49. “He thinks he will drown as the memories flood back, he cannot breathe, the lock is breached and his lungs are filled too bursting. But memories are seldom fatal.”

— Keith Miller

50. “With a sense of fulfillment stronger even than the sating of his hunger that morning, for he’d been starved of books much longer than of food, Pico joined the browsers. Inhaling the odor of mildewed hide as if he’d entered a confectionery, fondling the bindings of stippled leather or buckled cloth, running his fingers across the raised letters of the titles as though blind, for a moment he wished he’d saved the coin to buy a book, then giggled at his folly.”

— Keith Miller