The Heart Quotes

“The moment of death is no longer to be considered as the moment the heart stops, but as the moment when cerebral function ceases. In other words: I no longer think, therefore I no longer am. The heart is dead, long live the brain—a symbolic coup d’état, a Revolution.”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart

“They used to stay up late, talking into the night while the house was asleep, and maybe they would even whisper I love you, not really knowing what it was they were saying, only that they were saying it to each other”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart

“thousands of lungs will swell as one across the way, thousands of livers will be soaked with beer, thousands of kidneys will, simultaneously, filter bodily substances, and thousands of hearts will pump blood, and suddenly she is struck by the fragmentation of the world, by the absolute discontinuity of reality in this small area, by the thought of humanity being sprayed in an infinite divergence of trajectories—”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart

“Que faire Nicolas ? Enterrer les morts et réparer les vivants.”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart

“… and she understood that all forms of knowledge contain an element of transgression.”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart

“the two of them are pursuing a new trajectory begun only a few hours before, that they are no longer living in the same world as Cordélia and the planet’s other inhabitants but are moving away from it, absenting themselves, drifting toward another domain, the place where, perhaps, for a time, all those people would survive, together and inconsolable, all those people who had lost a child. Cord”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart

“But there is no such thing as later:later is an abstract concept”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart

“Because this body, fragmented and divided by life, becomes whole again under the hand that washes it”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart

“…I am mortal…”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart

“His eyes were his gaze, the way he looked at you. His skin was not only the mesh of his epidermis, his pores, it was his light and touch, the living sensors of his body.”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart

“…Then gives up, leaving it until later…but there is no such thing as later: later is an abstract concept. Thrown into flux by his random hours.”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart

“Glasgow 3 –utiliza ese lenguaje que comparten, lenguaje que proscribe la prolijidad como pérdida de tiempo, proscribe la elocuencia y seducción de las palabras, abusa de los sintagmas nominales, de los códigos y de los acrónimos, lenguaje en el que hablar significa por encima de todo describir, dicho de otro modo, informar acerca de un cuerpo, ensamblar los parámetros de una situación con el fin de permitir que pueda emitirse un diagnóstico, puedan pedirse unas pruebas, tratar y salvar: poder de lo sucinto.”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart

“My heart is full.”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart

“Revol thinks of that brilliant night, when the celestial vault had split open above the mountains, releasing unsuspected places they had tried to dive into.”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart

“How long does it take them before they accept death’s new regime? For now, there is no possible translation for what they are feeling; it strikes them down in a language that percedes language from before words, before grammar , an unsharable language that is perhaps another name for pain. Impossible to extricate themselves from it, impossible to substitute another description for it, impossible to reconstruct in another image. They are at once cut off from themselves and from the world that surrounds them.”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart

“No sooner was she twenty-three years old than she was twenty-eight; no sooner twenty-eight than thirty-one; time is speeding past her while she examines her existence with a cold, deadly gaze that takes aim at the different areas of her life, one by one-the damp studio crawling with roaches, mold growing in the grout between tiles; the bank loan swallowing all her spare cash; close, intense friendships marginalized by newborn babies, polarized by screaming sweetness that leaves her cold; stress-soaked days and canceled girls’ nights out, but, legs perfectly waxed, ending up jabbering in dreary wine bars with a bevy or available women, shrieking with forced laughter, and always joining in, out of cowardice, opportunism; occasional sexual adventures on crappy mattresses, or against greasy, sooty garage doors, with guys who are clumsy, rushed, stingy, unloving; an excess of alcohol to make all this shine; and the only encounter that makes her heart beat faster is with a guy who pushes back a strand of her hair to light her cigarette, his fingers brushing her temple and the lobe of her ear, who has mastered the art of the sudden appearance, whenever, wherever, his movements impossible to predict, as if he spent his life hiding behind a post, coming out to surprise her in the golden light of a late afternoon, calling her at night in a nearby cafe, walking toward her one morning from a street corner, and always stealing away just as suddenly when it’s over, like a magician, before returning … That deadly gaze strips away everything, even her face, even her body, no matter how well she takes care of it-fitness magazines, tubes of slimming cream, and one hour of floor barre in a freezing hall in Docks Vauban. She is alone and disappointed, in a sate of disgrace, stamping her feet as her teeth chatter and disillusionment invades her territories and her hinterland, darkening faces, ruining gestures, diverting intentions; it swells, this disillusionment, it multiplies, polluting the rivers and forests inside her, contaminating the deserts, infecting the groundwater, tearing the petals from flowers and dulling the luster in animals’ fur; it stains the ice floe beyond the polar circle and soils the Greek dawn, it smears the most beautiful poems with mournful misfortune, it destroys the planet and all its inhabitants from the Big Bang to the rockets of the future, and fucks up the whole world- this hollow, disenchanted world.”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart

“letter. The heart. But not”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart

“(...) chaque individu étant un receveur présumé potentiel, était-il si illogique, si infondé, après tout, que chacun soit envisagé comme un donneur présumé après sa mort ?”
― Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart