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# Weekend Words: Heart
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-heart/
- Published: 2016-08-07T13:30:21.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:29:01.000Z
- Description: "There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it."
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:17 (2016, 2017, part 1)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2016/08/heart.jpg)

Mario Balassi, “Ghismonda Receiving the Heart of her Lover” (n.d.), oil on canvas, 248 x 166 cm, private collection (image via Web Gallery of Art)

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](http://www.people.com/article/donald-trump-purple-heart-backlash-tammy-duckworth?ref=hyperallergic.com).

> 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**