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why

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Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve _ hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve _ not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us.A writer I very much admire is Don DeLillo. At an awards ceremony for him at the Folger Library several years ago, I said that he was like a great shark moving hidden in our midst, beneath the din and wreck of the moment, at apocalyptic ease in the very elements of our psyche and times that are most troublesome to us, that we most fear.Why do I write? Because I wanna be a great shark too. Another shark. A different shark, in a different part of the ocean. The ocean is vast.

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I figured out that I'm better off not explaining how and why I do the things that I do. If people can only read the surface of what you are, and that's all they want to see, let them see just what they need to see. Everything more is just something to keep and share only with the people that desire and are ready to receive that information. Words wasted on ears that do not listen and eyes that do not see are just seeds thrown on rocky ground. Prepare your ground first and then ask for the seeds.

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Why?_ She nods. __he had everything: a family who loved her, friends, activities. Her mother wants to know why she threw it all away?_ Why you want to know why? Step into a tanning booth and fry yourself for two or three days. After your skin bubbles and falls off, roll in coarse salt, then put on long underwear woven from spun glass and razor wire. Over that goes your regular clothes, as long as they are tight. Smoke gunpowder and go to school to jump through hoops, sit up and beg, and roll over on command. Listen to the whispers that curl into your head at night, calling you ugly and fat and stupid and bitch and whore and worst of all __ disappointment._ Puke and starve and cut and drink because you need an anesthetic and it works. For a while. But then the anesthetic turns into poison and by then it__ too late because you are mainlining it now, straight into your soul. It is rotting you and you can__ stop. Look in a mirror and find a ghost. Hear every heartbeat scream that everythingsinglething is wrong with you. __hy?_ is the wrong question. Ask __hy not?

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Why do people kill themselves?I think they do it when they can no longer find a reason to keep going. When nothing in heir lives is good enough to balance out the bad. And they do it when they no longer have the courage to carry on past some recent painful experience. They commit what is, in the end, a desperate, final call for help, that is hopefully heard in time by someone else. And what if it's not heard in time? I ask although I know the answer.Then they die.

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Followers of Jesus stake their claim on the firm belief that God will one day heal the planet of pain and death. Until that day arrives, the case against God must rely on incomplete evidence. We cannot really reconcile our pain-wracked world with a loving God because what we experience now is not the same as what God intends. Jesus himself prayed that God's will "be done, on earth as it is in heaven," a prayer that will not be fully answered until evil and suffering are finally defeated.

PY
Philip Yancey

The Question That Never Goes Away

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I read a page of Plato's great work. I can no longer understand anything, because behind the words on the page, which have their own heavenly brightness, to be sure, there shines an even brighter, an enormous, dazzling -why- that blots out everything, cancels out, destroys all meaning. All individual intelligence. When one has understood, one stops, satisfied with what one has understood. I do not understand. Understanding is far too little. To have understood is to be fixed, immobilized. It is as though one wanted to stop on one step in the middle of a staircase, or with one foot in the void and the other on the endless stair. But a mere why, a new why can set one off again, can unpetrify what was petrified and everything starts flowing afresh. How can one understand? One cannot.

EI
Eugène Ionesco

Fragments of a Journal

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Hippasus_ proof__r at least Nico__ retelling of it__as really so simple that when he finished sketching it out, I wasn__ even aware that we had actually proven anything. Nico paused for a few minutes to let us mull it over.It was Peter who broke the silence, ____ not sure I understand what we have done.__ico seemed to be expecting such a response. __tep back and examine the proof; in fact, you should try and do this with every proof you see or have to work out for yourself. ..."He again waited for his words to sink in, and it began to make sense for me. All my mathematics teachers (other than Bauji and Nico) always seemed to evade this part of their responsibility. They had been content to merely write out a proof on the blackboard and carry on, seemingly without concern for what the proof meant and what it told us.__ut you should not stop here. Even when you have understood a proof, and I hope you have indeed understood this proof, ask yourself the next question, the obvious one, but as critical: So what? Or, why are we proving this? What is the point? What is the context? How does it relate to us? To answer these questions we have to step back a little. Let me show you__t__ really quite delightful._ Now there was excitement in Nico__ voice.

GS
Gaurav Suri

A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel