Quotes from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are

Ann Voskamp ·  232 pages

Rating: (36.4K votes)


“I want to see beauty. In the ugly, in the sink, in the suffering, in the daily, in all the days before I die, the moments before I sleep.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“Sometimes you don’t know when you’re taking the first step through a door until you’re already inside.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“Practice is the hardest part of learning, and training is the essence of transformation.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“Being in a hurry. Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. I cannot think of a single advantage I've ever gained from being in a hurry. But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all the rushing.... Through all that haste I thought I was making up time. It turns out I was throwing it away.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“Simplicity is ultimately a matter of focus.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are



“...the secret to joy is to keep seeking God where we doubt He is.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“They say time is money, but that's not true. Time is life. And if I want the fullest life, I need to find fullest time... the busyness of your life leaving little room for the source of your life...

God gives us time. And who has time for God?

Which makes no sense.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“Humbly let go. Let go of trying to do, let go of trying to control, let go of my own way, let go of my own fears. Let God blow His wind, His trials, oxygen for joy's fire. Leave the hand open and be. Be at peace. Bend the knee and be small and let God give what God chooses to give because He only gives love and whisper a surprised thanks. This is the fuel for joy's flame. Fullness of joy is discovered only in the emptying of will. And I can empty. I can empty because counting His graces has awakened me to how He cherishes me, holds me, passionately values me. I can empty because I am full of His love. I can trust.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“Our fall was, has always been, and always will be, that we aren’t satisfied in God and what He gives. We hunger for something more, something other.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“Just that maybe … maybe you don’t want to change the story, because you don’t know what a different ending holds.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are



“Satan prowls but he’s a lion on a leash”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“And when I give thanks for the seemingly microscopic, I make a place for God to grow within me.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“It is in the dark that God is passing by. The bridge and our lives shake not because God has abandoned, but the exact opposite: God is passing by. God is in the tremors. Dark is the holiest ground, the glory passing by. In the blackest, God is closest, at work, forging His perfect and right will. Though it is black and we can't see and our world seems to be free-falling and we feel utterly alone, Christ is most present to us...”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“A life contemplating the blessings of Christ becomes a life acting the love of Christ.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I've seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are



“Gratitude for the seemingly insignificant—a seed—this plants the giant miracle.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“Losses do that. One life-loss can infect the whole of a life. Like a rash that wears through our days, our sight becomes peppered with black voids. Now everywhere we look, we only see all that isn’t: holes, lack, deficiency.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“...life change comes when we receive life with thanks and ask for nothing to change.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“He does have surprising, secret purposes. I open a Bible, and His plans, startling, lie there barefaced. It’s hard to believe it, when I read it, and I have to come back to it many times, feel long across those words, make sure they are real. His love letter forever silences any doubts: “His secret purpose framed from the very beginning [is] to bring us to our full glory” (1 Corinthians 2:7 NEB).”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“Thanksgiving-giving thanks in everything-prepares the way that God might show us His fullest salvation in Christ.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are



“When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us?”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“That which tears open our souls, those holes that splatter our sight, may actually become the thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the heart-aching beauty beyond. To Him. To the God whom we endlessly crave.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“Stress isn't only a joy stealer. The way we respond to it can be sin.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“I hunger for filling in a world that is starved.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“Joy is the realest reality, the fullest life, and joy is always given, never grasped. God gives gifts and I give thanks and I unwrap the gift given: joy.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are



“Lament is a cry of belief in a good God, a God who has His ear to our hearts, a God who transfigures the ugly into beauty. Complaint is the bitter howl of unbelief in any benevolent God in this moment, a distrust in the love-beat of the Father's heart.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“Worry is the facade of taking action when prayer really is.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“As long as thanks is possible, then joy is always possible.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


“In our rushing, bulls in china shops, we break our own lives.”
― Ann Voskamp, quote from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are


About the author

Ann Voskamp
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“Life always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant.’ —Paulo Coelho”
― John Marrs, quote from The Wronged Sons


“I don't advise a haircut, man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hairs are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos, and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bald-headed men are uptight.”
― Bruce Robinson, quote from Withnail and I: The Screenplay


“Some people is born at the start of a long hard row to hoe. Well, I am older than God's dog and been in this world a long time and it seems to me that right from the git-go, Larkin Stanton had the longest and hardest row I've ever seen.”
― Sheila Kay Adams, quote from My Old True Love


“I'm fine," she said, wondering how you could say something so patently true yet untrue at the same time.”
― Jojo Moyes, quote from The Horse Dancer


“While the rest of the class is hanging on every syllable that comes out of Mr. Landau's mouth, I'm looking at the false tongue poster and I'm kind of wishing it wasn't wrong. There's something nice about those thick black arrows: sour here, salty there, like there's a right place for everything. Instead of the total confusion the human tongue actually turns out to be.”
― Rebecca Stead, quote from Liar & Spy


Interesting books

Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus
(12.9K)
Pastwatch: The Redem...
by Orson Scott Card
Our Oriental Heritage
(1.7K)
Our Oriental Heritag...
by Will Durant
Vengeance in Death
(30.3K)
Vengeance in Death
by J.D. Robb
The Dhammapada
(18.4K)
City of Glass
(12.1K)
City of Glass
by Paul Auster
Nightfall
(24.3K)
Nightfall
by Isaac Asimov

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.