Sometimes, other people just say it better

I know I've been on an unintentional blogging hiatus. More of world-news-via-Internet hiatus. The world is difficult to keep up with, depressing at times. And like a good friend of mine always says, you need to make sure you get some self-care now and then. Plus, I've been in more of a reading mood than a writing mood lately. Not that the two are ever separate, but sometimes I like to just fully absorb the words others have written, without interjecting my own writing. So below is some of myself in quotes:

"You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it." --James Baldwin

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." --Sylvia Plath

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited." --Sylvia Plath

"A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men." --Gloria Steinem

"Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results." --Margaret Atwood

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us." --Charles Bukowski

"To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries."--Richard Dawkins

"If there is hope, it lies in the proles." --George Orwell

"Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering." --Nicole Krauss

"Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do." --Wendell Berry