Hollow Heart Quotes

“Try and make them understand that while artists can recycle their suffering in their art, I didn't know what to do with mine.”
― Viola Di Grado, Hollow Heart

“I'd understood that grief is a Russian nesting doll: it never ends, it just hides inside new grief, and every new instance of grief contains all the previous ones. So my grief was invisible but it was there, inside every stupid daily disappointment.”
― Viola Di Grado, Hollow Heart

“It's only reality, it can't hurt you.”
― Viola Di Grado, Hollow Heart

“We used electricity only sparingly because we had so little money, and we used our faces to smile only sparingly because happiness wasn't something we did well.”
― Viola Di Grado, Hollow Heart

“In your posthumous years, at a certain point, you arrive at what at first might be taken for pessimism, but it's really the malady of objectivity. Objectivity is the malady of things as they are. Objectivity has a sudden onset, a collateral effect of the suspension of one's encephalic functions. It shows up uncooked and intact, with neither an instruction booklet nor a definite article.”
― Viola Di Grado, Hollow Heart

“It was unacceptable that death should perform this kind of facelift on the reputations of artists.”
― Viola Di Grado, Hollow Heart

“I wanted to get angry, but even the stones of my anger, rather than manifest themselves into shouts and fits of rage remained inside me like kidney stones.”
― Viola Di Grado, Hollow Heart

“Try and make them understand that while artists can recycle their suffering in their art, I didn't know what to do with mine. The things that you don't know how to use don't belong to you.”
― Viola Di Grado, Hollow Heart

“In fact, people here dislike suicides. We're the pariahs of the deceased community, and they avoid us like the plague. We are the ones who discarded the only thing they desire. Just try and make them understand, understand that when I was alive, I loved life much more then they ever did, that they're a bunch of hypocrites for changing their preferences only afterward, like children after you take their ball away. Try and make them understand that while artists can recycle their suffering in their art, I didn't know what to do with mine. The things that you don't know how to use don't belong to you.”
― Viola Di Grado, Hollow Heart

“Here's the worst thing about death: the inherent racism of human language. While the living gorge themselves on the present indicative, all we can hope for are moldy leftovers of the past tense. If you even want the tiniest helping of a verb in the present tense, you must necessarily have the obscene badge of a beating heart pinned to your chest.”
― Viola Di Grado, Hollow Heart

“When they're alive, people are so free that they need boundaries. Both instinctively and culturally they identify boundaries with death. That's how it's always been, it's been that way for everyone, and still is. People think that when you stop living, there's a bright line. Whether they envision it as a direct transfer to paradise or the simple cessation of all vital functions, they've always imagined this dividing line. They need that wall. They need to know that there is no knocking it down. No one has the courage to imagine it doesn't exist. Literature and religion have covered that wall with pious inscriptions.”
― Viola Di Grado, Hollow Heart

“Again today, empty tubes of toothpaste will be tossed out, and millions of obedient muscles will activate smiles.”
― Viola Di Grado, Hollow Heart

“In 1958, two scientist, Santini and Dell'Erba studied the spread of rigor mortis through the body. But until now no one had ever thought to consider its geographic diffusion: how could I help but feel misunderstood? The rigor mortis of planet Earth started with my heart: not only was it the first organ in my body to stop, it was also the first to harden. Two hours after my death, while I was still in the tub, its cavities began to tighten in on themselves, and its walls thickened as if to brace themselves against this one last disappointment. Then came time for my eyelids and all the muscles of my gaunt face. Then for the muscles of my head and neck, my upper body , my belly, my slightly bowed legs, my feet. Twelve hours later, I was completely rigid. Then came time for the rest of the planet.”
― Viola Di Grado, Hollow Heart

“He shut the door. I could have passed through it and gone back to be with him, but it struck me as an obscene act. My immateriality had never before struck me as so vulgar. I stayed inside the door. I stayed the door . . . I thought: "The city of confusion is broken down: every house is shut up, that no man may come in. Isaiah 24:10.”
― Viola Di Grado, Hollow Heart