Ann Morton Voskamp:
(Listowel (Ontario), 10 August 1973).
Canadian psychologist and writer. She writes Christian-inspired books targeting women in particular. Her best-known publication is A Thousand Thanks.
I have lived pain, and my life can tell, I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks to the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on summer humid nights.
The passage sits inside a larger argument she makes throughout the book: that acknowledging real suffering (“poor and hideous suffering… the hungry and the guns that go to war”) doesn’t cancel out the discipline of gratitude — it makes it more urgent. Her claim is almost paradoxical: refusing to notice and give thanks for small, ordinary beauties (light through leaves, the smell of roses, crickets at night) doesn’t make you more serious or more attuned to the world’s pain — it actually ‘adds’ to that pain. Neglecting gratitude is, in her framing, its own kind of wound.
This connects to her broader thesis in the book, expressed elsewhere as the idea that giving thanks turns the “canyon of pain into a megaphone to proclaim the ultimate goodness of God” even in suffering. She later revisited this same passage in a 2022 blog post reflecting on gratitude amid a “hurting world,” and again in a 2026 piece — suggesting it’s a line she returns to as a kind of personal touchstone, not just a one-off sentiment from the original book.
Author and origin:
The quote is from Ann Voskamp’s book “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are.” The full passage reads (in the fuller version): “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.”
Voskamp is a Christian author and blogger whose memoir “One Thousand Gifts” (2010) became a New York Times bestseller, chronicling her practice of keeping a daily list of “graces” as a spiritual discipline of gratitude — what she calls, using the Greek term, “eucharisteo.”
