Weekend Words: Heart
"There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it."
This week, when a military veteran handed Donald Trump his Purple Heart, the Republican nominee, who received a medical deferment from the Vietnam War, responded, “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.” The backlash was swift.
You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a firefly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart.
—Fred Allen
As for me, except for an occasional heart attack, I feel as young as I ever did.
—Robert Benchley
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart—
you can’t plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.
—Frank O’Hara, from “My Heart”
Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.
—Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
—William Butler Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”
I need you (I need you) more than anyone, darlin’
You know that I have from the start
So build me up (build me up) Buttercup, don’t break my heart
—Mike d’Abo and Tony Macaulay, “Build Me Up Buttercup”
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of is days
Teach the free man how to praise.
—W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”
A heart — how shall I say? — too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
—Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess”
Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale… from hell’s heart I stab at thee.
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick
I want you to come on, come on, come on, come on and take it
Take it!
Take another little piece of my heart now, baby!
Oh, oh, break it!
Break another little bit of my heart now, darling, yeah, yeah, yeah.
—Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns, “Piece of My Heart”
Batter my heart, three-personed God; for, you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.
—John Donne, Holy Sonnets
There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.
—George Bernard Shaw
