11 Quotes & Sayings By Mark Matousek

Mark J. Matousek is a professional writer, multi-published author, and public speaker. He has been a full-time author for thirty years, writing books and teaching the historic method of writing and publishing for others. Mark has written and published more than fourteen books and his work has sold over one million copies Read more

His books have been translated into sixteen languages and he is currently working on his fifteenth book . Mark's work can be found at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com, Ingram Book Group, iUniverse.com, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, and other major retailers such as Books-A-Million.

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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?. Mark Matousek
Joy is not just about being happy. Joy is a...
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Joy is not just about being happy. Joy is a rigorous spiritual practice of saying yes to life on life’s terms, Mark Matousek
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Reinvention is my philosophy, if you want to call it that, ” he says, looking out the window. “Imagination is the key to creating a life that is ever new.” Stanley turns his eyes to me. “We are each of us a changeling person, ” he says. “We are not going to be the same decade after decade. Wisdom results from confronting not only one’s desires and capacities but also one’s limitations.” “The Layers, ” one of Stanley’s best-loved poems, is his crystallization of this wisdom. I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road is precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: “Live in the layers, not on the litter.” Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes. Mark Matousek
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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
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The French have a term for this brazenness: je m’en foutisme, the brave art of not giving a damn. Mark Matousek
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Joy is not just about being happy. Joy is a rigorous spiritual practice of saying yes to life on life’s terms Mark Matousek
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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
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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
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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
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Whatever it takes to break your heart and wake you up is grace. Mark Matousek