"If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms—if you find yourself at a loss for what do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body—it’s because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what’s inside and what’s outside, was so much less."

Nicole Krauss | The History of Love

[Absence of the heart]

Absence of the heart
Is the testimony of pain.
This
Is words, words only…
A small salty rain,
The wind slaps
With a wet, alien palm.
The day has gone blind, and grown,
Grown into a real titan
Of the white desert of blindness.
A quiet, quiet cause —
This right is yours.
Rise up, and walk on the ice
To the rhythm of your heart alone,
To your own unreplicable rhythm.

Śviatłana Ўśpienskaja

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Being a Heart by Young Ju Choi

Science Fiction

Just now I touched my chest
And felt my heart quivering there.
This must be one of the bad times.
 
I think it is quivering with remorse
And exhaustion. Once I saw a heart
Beating in a documentary. I was a very
 
Little girl and the sight disgusted me.
Throbbing and not stopping my heart betrays
Me and yet remains sure and true, a thing
 
Of nature. Earth bleeding
Its guts out on the sea floor exhausts
Me with remorse and shame, and yet I have to trust it
 
As wealth is proven by how terribly it devastates
Itself, and I am but one symptom among billions of the wealth
Of Earth. A tired feeling that is recuperated by a passing spaceship
 
Or an infinitude like fame but more universal. I will have to miss you
Earth; I miss you already. And yet when I touch myself whom I should
Not trust it is still only the heaviest and most jealous feelings that bind me to you, like blood.

Ariana Reines

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Blossom Burst Heart by Edward Blake Edwards

"Every one of us is losing something precious to us. […] Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s what part of it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that’s where I imagine it - there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let fresh air in, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live for ever in your own private library."

Haruki Murakami | Kafka on the Shore

"Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That’s it. That’s my heart."

Haruki Murakami | Kafka on the Shore

In November

Outside the house the wind is howling
and the trees are creaking horribly.
This is an old story
with its old beginning,
as I lay me down to sleep.
But when I wake up, sunlight
has taken over the room.
You have already made the coffee
and the radio brings us music
from a confident age. In the paper
bad news is set in distant places.
Whatever was bound to happen
in my story did not happen.
But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.
Perhaps a name was changed.
A small mistake. Perhaps
a woman I do not know
is facing the day with the heavy heart
that, by all rights, should have been mine.

Lisel Mueller

"Treason is a blow that comes unexpectedly. If you know your heart well, it will never be able to do that to you. Because you’ll know its dreams and wishes, and will know how to deal with them. You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it’s better to listen to what it has to say. That way, you’ll never have to fear an unanticipated blow."

Paulo Coelho | The Alchemist

"Listen to your heart. It knows all things, because it came from the Soul of the World, and it will one day return there."

Paulo Coelho | The Alchemist

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Remain Behind by Mayumi Haryoto

t r e e by Valentina Vallone

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Johny Cutting the Heartstrings by Jana Brike

The Humbled Heart

Go your seeking, soul.
Mine the proven path of time’s foretelling.  
Yours accordance with some mysteried whole.  
I am but your passion-haunted dwelling.

Bring what news you can,
Stranger, loved of body’s humbled heart.  
Say one whispered word to mortal man  
From that peace whereof he claims you part.

Hither-hence, my guest,
Blood and bone befriend, where you abide  
Till withdrawn to share some timeless quest.  
I am but the brain that dreamed and died.

Siegfried Sassoon

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Healing by Shira Sela