Writing why I do it ?

When someone asked me how , irrespective of whatever you do or however busy you are , you seem to read and to write on a daily basis , if not hourly basis.

I told him there is an inherent need to listen to, to read, to learn, to follow ideas, to generate ideas, to internalise the wisdom that we learn from others and also to write our own reactions or perceptions.

"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self"- Cyril Connolly

The folowing quotes flashed across my mind and I replied to him in a jiffy, of course some of the quotes are obsessively struck in my bone marrow like the last seven quotes.

I told him to chew on these for the next 24 hours and assimilate what they do to him.

Starting with a very haughty quote of Tom Stoppard, “My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers” , and meandering through the following.

1. There was a time when I had all the answers. My real growth began when I discovered that the questions to which I had the answers were not the important questions.-Reinhold Niebuhr

2. “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.” ― Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

3. Write close to the bone, write until you’re not thinking in words anymore -Bonnie Friedman

4. Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story. F. Scott Fitzgerald

5. You should know more than what you put on the page. The reader can sense that. SUSAN ORLEAN

6. You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them. ― Maya Angelou

7. There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.

~Ansel Adams

8. “Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ¬people. Nothing that happens to a writer–however happy, however tragic–is ever wasted.” -P.D. James

9. Just trust your own voice. And keep exploring the things that are interesting to you. Nikki GIOVANNI

10. The act of writing puts you in confrontation with yourself, which is why I think writers assiduously avoid writing. FRAN LEBOWITZ

11. If you really want this writing life, don't ever give up Bill Bibo, Jr

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself. CONROY

12. You are your own stories, free to imagine and experience what it means to be human without fear-T. Morrison

13. I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way. ~Simone de Beauvoir

14. You never know what you will learn ’til you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed. ANITA BROOKNER

15. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something. JOHN IRVING

16. A writer fails, not when a reader is not moved; but when, as a reader, the writer is not moved. Gerard de Marigny

17. Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire-A. Rich

18. "The spirit of Advaita is not to keep away from anything, but to keep in tune with everything." -  Swami Chinmayananda

19. “In the end nothing less than the whole of everything can be the truth of anything at all”- William James

20.  “We live in a changing universe, and few things are changing faster than our conception of it”-Timothy Ferris

21. “There is no tomorrow. There is only a planet turning on its axis, and a creature given to optimistic fancies”-Robert Brault

22. “Evolution itself is an open ended and indeterminate process”… “Given the remarkable progress in our understanding of biochemistry, molecular biology, and evolution as a whole … we have failed to develop concepts, ideas, even a language that could capture the dance of this life” - Guy Murchie

23. “Humans have a need for a stable frame of reference. Religion apparently fills this need. In effect, humans crave answers to questions that no other source of knowledge has an answer to, which only religion may seem to answer. However, a sense of free will must be given in order for religion to appear healthy. An authoritarian notion of religion appears detrimental.”- Erich Fromm,

24. विद्या ददाति विनयं विनयाद्याति पात्रताम् ।

पात्रत्वाद्धनमाप्नोति धनाद्धर्मं ततः सुखम् ॥ ५ ॥

vidyA dadAti vinayaM, vinayAdyAti pAtratAM |
pAtratvAddhanamApnoti, dhanAddharmaMtataH sukhaM || 5 ||

(true/complete) knowledge gives discipline[humility], from discipline [humility] comes worthiness, from worthiness one gets wealth, from wealth (one does) good deeds, from that (comes) joy.

This particular quote is an outer shell of the egg which contains these:-

"All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants”- Isaac Newton

 Shakespeare once said “I have bought golden opinions from all sorts of people”.

William Lyon Phelps puts it, “One of our secrets of life is to keep our intellectual curiosity acute”. 

Or as Thomas H. Huxley says, “Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.”

We must remember that we owe to so many souls that has made our  evolution to enhance from Kuru disease generators [this disease happens because of cannibalism] to cyber Guru Venerators.