Naturally some of us write more than others, by necessity and desire, but I was reading Lincoln: the Biography of a Writer last week and not coincidentally, ran across one of President Lincoln’s most impassioned texts on the power of writing. He wrote his own material, as they say nowadays, and often kept it in his hat (literally). But, more than that, he knew how much words mattered – thought I’d share it, since it has broader context, as well.
“Writing – the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye – is the great invention of the world. Great in the astonishing range of analysis and combination which necessarily underlies the most crude and general conception of it – very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and of space; and great, not only in its direct benefits, but greatest help to all other inventions.” (Abraham Lincoln)
Doug Hoekstra 