Mark Matousek Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

The quest for knowledge is what makes humans survive, even if it hurts." I have trouble imagining that this éminence grise was once a sixteen-year-old Hungarian boy in a death camp. "There's a troublesome verse from Ecclesiastes about this," he tells me. "It says that the more we know, the more pain we have. But because we are human beings, this must be. Otherwise we become objects rather than subjects." He pauses for a moment to let this sink in. "Of course, it hurts when we see pictures of people throwing themselves out of windows, children who are orphaned, the widows," Wiesel says. "But there is no way out of what we've seen." "And how do we live with what we know?" I ask "How can we live with not knowing?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.