By Any Other Name...

As I've gushed several times on here in the past month or so, I've really been enjoying my bloggy renaissance--especially "meeting" new bloggy friends. One of those is cdnkaro over at four under 4 (plus two), who is juggling enough balls to make most of us dizzy and still somehow finding time to blog daily and visit other blogs and just be generally fabulous. Both of us were recently  tagged with the "Tell Me About Yourself" award, which entailed telling seven things about ourselves and passing the award along to fifteen others.

Yesterday, cdnkaro posted "The Versatile Blogger Award," which had pretty much the same "rules" and passed it on to me.

As with cdnkaro, my blogging circle's limited diameter makes it virtually impossible for me to pass this on to fifteen others who haven't already received it in one or both of its forms. But I'm trying to expand the circle little by little and would like to pass The Versatile Blogger Award on to two worthy bloggers that have come into the circle recently. 

One is sebtown294 who blogs over at In Search of a Title. I followed a comment she left here over to her post of some pretty amazing artwork and have been stopping back regularly since.  

The other is Sarah who blogs over at My Life In Contradictions. I only "met" her a day or so ago when she "followed" me on Blogher, but I'm looking forward to getting to know her better.

Having just posted a 7 things list (not to mention posted 42 daily posts in a row), I feel like I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel of share-worthy things so decided instead to share 7 quotes that I think reveal a little something about how I see the world.

1. "I believe now that I wrote myself into life. Before I learnt how to do it I lived as if blind, forever raging against the dark. Learning how to write illuminated life itself for me, letting me see fully for the first time its shape and dimensions. Before I learnt how to write, I did not know who I was."

~~Susan Johnson, A Better Woman: A Memoir of Motherhood

2. "As I see it, we know we're truly grown up when we stop trying to fix people. All we can really do for people is love them and treat them with kindness. That goes for ourselves, too. That goes for ourselves, especially."

~~Phillip Simmons, Learning To Fall: The Blessings of An Imperfect Life

3. "What separates bliss and hell when you've got small children: about ten seconds."

~~Judith Newman, You Make Me Feel Like An Unnatural Woman: Diary of a New (Older) Mother

4. "Although my passion is for words, I also love playing with ideas, looking at something from as many sides as possible, lifting up an observation and shaking it to see if a revelation might fall out." 

~~Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain

5. "...when she glanced over at this new book on her nightstand, stacked atop the one she finished last night, she reached for it automatically, as if reading were the singular and obvious first task of the day, the only viable way to negotiate the transit from sleep to obligation."

~~Michael Cunningham, The Hours

6. "She finally found grudges to be unwieldy things--hold those, and pretty soon you have to drop amusements to maintain your grudge grip; blow your energy on that and you may have none left for mischief."

~~Carrie Fisher, The Best Awful

7. "I wish I could leave a trail of gratefulness behind me that you could see, glowing thanks. I would pay to see the stars, but I never have to. This to me is one of those miracles."

~~Elizabeth Berg, True To Form