Ann Voskamp Quotes - Page 9

I started blogging in 2004, light years ago on the Web.

So my blog wasn't about "platform" but really, it was everything you are not "supposed" to do in blogging.

God gives gifts and I give thanks and I unwrap the gift given: joy.

The greatest compliment of the book [One Thousand Gifts]? Maybe the Muslim man in Iraq who was given the book and came to a saving knowledge of Jesus, wanted to live his life in thanks to God?

Really, the greatest compliments about a book [One Thousand Gifts] are never about the book, or the author of the book, but about the reader and God and how the pages helped them connect at a deeper level.

It's the greatest compliment when the writer becomes invisible in the whole process.

I make soup and I back bread and I know my supreme need is joy in God and I know I can't experience deep joy in God until I deep trust in God. I shine sinks and polish through to the realization that trusting God is my most urgent need. If I deep trusted God in all the facets of my life, wouldn't that deep heal my anxiety, my self-condemnation, my soul holes? The fear is suffocating, terrorizing, and I want the remedy, and it is trust. Trust is everything. If fear keeps our lives small, does a life that receives all of God in this moment grow large too?

The blog is meant to be a bit of a side chapel - a place to slip into and still and encounter the glory of God - and come away again with a fresh sense that your life, right where you are, is a holy experience - that God dwells with you and in you, and where you are is holy ground, worthy of reverence and celebration and wonder.

Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn't rescue the suffering.

Manna today or I starve.

Really good writing, from my perspective, runs a lot like a visual on the screen. You need to create that kind of detail and have credibility with the reader, so the reader knows that you were really there, that you really experienced it, that you know the details. That comes out of seeing.

When grief is deepest, words are fewest.

Once you have tasted conviction, you can’t bear to keep swallowing complacency.

A lack of doxology leads to depravity.

I know the theological answers, but do my blood and my pulse?

The frame of a soul was never made for fame. The frame of a soul was made to serve.

Isn't falling in love always the fullest life?

From all of our beginnings, we keep reliving the Garden story.

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.

The cynics, they can only speak of the dark, of the obvious, and this is not hard. For all it's supposed sophistication, it's cynicism that's simplistic. In a fallen world, how profound is to see the cracks?

Of asking nothing of the reader - but offering a still, quiet oasis in the cybersphere to go vertical with God. An island of stillness to know that He is God.

We don't see the material world for what it is meant to be: the means to communion with God.... There is a belief missing, that God is good and that he gives good gifts.

[Bill Jensen] shared his extensive publishing background with me, and prayerfully offered to work out a proposal and to see if God opened any publishing doors? I never get over the unexpected ways of God.

The book [ One Thousand Gifts] took just over a year to write, on the fringe hours, early and late, around home educating 6 kids and farming and blogging.

Wherever you are, be all there." I have lived the runner, panting ahead in worry, pounding back in regrets, terrified to live in the present, because here-time asks me to do the hardest of all: just open wide and receive.