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WIMA sponsors National Handwriting Day each year on Jan. 23 to coincide with John Hancock’s birthday. Hancock was the first to sign the Declaration of Independence, marking the document with his well-known signature. Reuters

With the invasion of technology, the beauty of handwritten letters and precise penmanship has unfortunately been lost in the digital shuffle. But, for the holders of enviable signatures and handwriting, Jan. 23 is your day to revel in the joy of taking a pen to paper.

First launched in 1977, National Handwriting Day was created by the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association to honor the importance of handwriting in our daily lives. In celebration of the holiday, we've gathered 20 quotes praising the power of writing. The day is also, by some accounts, the birthday of John Hancock, one of the nation's founding fathers, who was known for his penmanship.

So find your favorite composition notebook, grab your trusty ballpoint pen and jot down your favorites from the list below.

1. "I don't know how much longer I'll be around. I'll probably be writing when the Lord says, 'Maya, Maya Angelou, it's time." - Maya Angelou
2. "I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering." - Robert Frost
3. "When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature." - Ernest Hemingway
4. "A reading man and woman is a ready man and woman, but a writing man and woman is exact." - Marcus Garvey
5. "All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland." - Jimi Hendrix
6. "Good writing is like a windowpane." - George Orwell
7. "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." - Ray Bradbury
8. "Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else". - Gloria Steinem
9. "Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers." - Isaac Asimov
10. "Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence." - Alice Walker
11. "You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you." - Stephen King
12. "True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those who move easiest have learned to dance." - Alexander Pope
13. "And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss." - J. K. Rowling
14. "Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing." - Sylvia Plath
15. "Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people." - Roald Dahl
16. "The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe." - Gustave Flaubert

17. "When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing." - Tennessee Williams
18. "For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that."- Alice Walker
19. "The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen." - Lee Iacocca
20. "I like myself better when I'm writing regularly." - Willie Nelson