Mark Matousek Quotes & Sayings

When we set our hearts on knowing the truth, we assist one another in the long tender work of awakening. When the story is right, and the people we love are waiting to listen, we tell each other how to live. — Mark Matousek

The more we remember that life is a gift-that everything changes, we're not in control-the stronger our sense of well-being becomes. — Mark Matousek

Whatever it takes to break your heart and wake you up is grace. — Mark Matousek

As one widow put it to me, Strength doesn't mean being able to stand up to anything, but being able to crawl on your belly a long, long time before you can stand up again. — Mark Matousek

You go on with your life, because life goes on," says Isabel. "You see this in anyone who has survived a traumatic situation. My own daughter died, for example." Her only daughter, Paula Frias, died of porphyria in 1992 at the age of twenty-seven. "At first you think you can't live with this," says the author, who just turned sixty-five. "It's just too much. Then life begins to take over. One morning you wake up and you want to eat chocolate. Or walk in the woods. Or open a bottle of wine. You get back up on your feet." "When you can, right?" "You have no choice!" Isabel insists. "You cannot let the bullies keep you on the floor! I have been on my knees a thousand times, and I always get up. — Mark Matousek

Joy is not just about being happy. Joy is a rigorous spiritual practice of saying yes to life on life's terms — Mark Matousek

There's a myth among amateurs, optimists and fools that beyond a certain level of achievement, famous artists retire to some kind of Elysium where criticism no longer wounds and work materializes without their effort. — Mark Matousek

The French have a term for this brazenness: je m'en foutisme, the brave art of not giving a damn. — Mark Matousek

You don't actually get over things ... you incorporate them. They become part of everything you are. I don't mean that you walk about crying all the time. But you change. — Mark Matousek

When people are in need, you must be present. When people suffer, you must let them know you're suffering with them." "The good side of bad acts?" I say. "I would not say that from horror comes goodness. That would be giving horror too much credit. But goodness prevails in spite of horror. — Mark Matousek

Survival requires a dose of madness - what cynics call "hoping against hope" - just like art does; you conjure your future from white space, locate the hidden person, yourself, against this unfamiliar background, peering through grief and loss at something greater. "Survivors are more urgently rooted in life than most of us," observed one Holocaust expert. "Their will to survive is one with the thrust of life itself, as stubborn as the upsurge of spring. A strange exultation fills [their] soul, a sense of being equal to the worst. — Mark Matousek