I think the fall in Eden was ultimately a failure to give thanks.

- Ann Voskamp

I'm not a fast writer at all. I come empty and wait upon the Lord. So it really is all a waiting process, a patient process.

- Ann Voskamp

I write a chapter, then edit it and edit it and edit it and edit it. I don't think we mine creativity from within. It's bestowed from on high, from God.

- Ann Voskamp

Whatever I'm writing comes organically out of my life.

- Ann Voskamp

The real romantics imagine greying and sagging and wrinkling as the deepening of something sacred.

- Ann Voskamp

The real romantics are the boring ones - they let another heart bore a hole deep into theirs.

- Ann Voskamp

Scales always lie. They don't make a scale that ever told the truth about value, about worth, about significance.

- Ann Voskamp

If I don't have words, it's a sign I'm not reading enough.

- Ann Voskamp

Counting one thousand gifts, I discovered I could count on God.

- Ann Voskamp

Measuring sticks try to rank some people as big and some people as small - but we aren't sizes. We are souls. There are no better people or worse people - there are only God-made souls.

- Ann Voskamp

Pick up a yardstick to measure your life against anyone else's, and you've just picked up a stick and beaten up your own soul.

- Ann Voskamp

I came into this world the way every person on the planet does - with clenched fists.

- Ann Voskamp

Sometimes God answers our questions with questions.

- Ann Voskamp

Adults are tempted to produce and perform Christmas for their kids and their families, and they arrive at Christmas Day weary and disillusioned.

- Ann Voskamp

Giving thanks is that: making the canyon of pain into a megaphone to proclaim the ultimate goodness of God when Satan and all the world would sneer at us to recant.

- Ann Voskamp

A simplified Christmas isn't about circumstances as much as it is about focus.

- Ann Voskamp

My husband is Dutch, and his family, when you sat down to eat food at the table, you never left the table until you ate living bread and drank living water. They never left the table until they'd read Scripture together. So morning, lunch, suppertime, Scripture was always read at the table, and then there was prayer to close.

- Ann Voskamp

Get this, kids - how a man proposes isn't what makes him romantic. It's how a man purposes to lay down his life that makes him romantic.

- Ann Voskamp

Gratitude's not a natural posture. The prince of darkness is ultimately a spoiled ingrate, and I've spent most of my life as kin to the fist-shaker.

- Ann Voskamp

The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring fullest Light to all the world.

- Ann Voskamp