I discussed the matter with professor Fruhestadt. Within a month, at a 100 dollars a piece, he would provide me with the collection I wanted. I have done it: three hundred pigs were slaughtered —and naturally sold at regular prices— and now I have here, in a luminous gallery at the Concord cottage, one of the most original collections of the world.

At both sides, on pine shelfs, a hundred glass jugs are lined up; within them, a hundred hearts of the darkest red are beating. Immersed in the solution that mantains their muscular activity —and which the assistant renews daily— the hundred hearts contract at a tired and irregular, but continous, rhythm. A hundred meat engines working in vain, separated from the machines they once animated.

That eternal heartbeat without purpose nor sense attracts me strongly and suggests strange thoughts. It gives me great pleasure to imagine, seduced by the resemblance, that I possess a hundred human hearts, of bodies once alive and warm; a hundred hearts that suffered, that revelled, that knew the paralysis of fear and the acceleration of love. They are only a pretense of life now: they are free of the creature they once served; they throb worthlessly, for nothing, for no one. Just to amuse myself, for I have never been able to stand the trances of poets and novelists for the “heart”.

This ideal symbol of all the sentimental babble, of all the patetic ejaculations, is here reduced to its mechanic materiality, inside those great jugs. The bodies to which this hearts belonged are dead, the souls have vanished, and this blackened pear-shaped muscle keeps throbbing stupidly behind the glass, as if something beautiful and noble still corresponded to its heartbeats.

The ten thousand men and women, children and patriarchs assembled there felt no different—they grew weak as young maidens who have succumbed to the charms of a lover. They were overcome by a powerful sense of goodwill, of tenderness, of crazy, childish infatuation, yes, God help them, of love for this little homicidal man, and they were unable, unwilling to do anything about it. It was like a fit of weeping you cannot fight down, like tears that have been held back too long and rise up from deep within you, dissolving whatever resists them, liquefying it, and flushing it away. These people were now pure liquid, their spirits and minds were melted; nothing was left but an amorphous liquid, and all they could feel was their hearts floating and sloshing about within them, and they laid those hearts, each man, each woman, in the hands of the little man in the blue frock coat, for better or for worse. They loved him.

May those who love us love us
And for those who don't love us
May God turn their hearts,
And if He can't turn their hearts,
May He turn their ankles,
So we may know them by their limping.

It was as if I had only just been able to see colors and shapes for the first time. I was so enthralled with the buttons on Lestat's black coat that I looked at nothing else for a long time. Then Lestat began to laugh, and I heard his laughter as I had never heard anything before. His heart I still heard like the beating of a drum, and now came this metallic laughter. It was confusing, each sound running into the next sound, like the mingling reverberations of bells, until I learned to separate the sounds, and then they overlapped, each soft but distinct, increasing but discrete, peals of laughter.

Ever seen the human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood.

[Arthur] Evans was a paradoxical man, “flamboyant, and oddly modest; dignified and loveably ridiculous… He could be fantastically kind and fundamentally uninterested in other people… He was always loyal to his friends, and never gave up doing something he had set his heart on for the sake of someone he loved.”

I'm proud of you. Anyone will tell you how much I brag about you. How I go on and on about this great anonymous person out there who scrolls and reads and scrolls and reads. “These kids,” I tell them. “Man, these kids got heart. I never…” And I can't even finish a sentence because I'm absolutely blubbering.

And my heart glows bright red under my filmy, translucent skin and they have to administer 10cc of JavaScript to get me to come back. (I respond well to toxins in the blood.) Man, that stuff will kick the peaches right out your gills!

Pantagruel plucked up his heart, took a fresh courage to him, and was inflamed with a desire to profit in his studies more than ever, so that if you had seen him, how he took pains, and how he advanced in learning, you would have said that the vivacity of his spirit amidst the books was like a great fire amongst dry wood, so active it was, vigorous and indefatigable.

Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist—a master—and that is what Auguste Rodin was—can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is… and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be… and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart…. no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn't matter to you and me; we were never meant to be admired—but it does to them. Look at her!

I realize I will never hear from Dena again, and I will never call her. It gives me a chill. It is a strange thing to end a friendship, even if you know it's what you want. It's like death; all of a sudden your experience of a person becomes finite.

Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I feel I can't take it. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst.

Time passed. The slam of his heart lessened. The sweat streaming from his pores turned from hot to cool, made his smart clothing clammy. He began to shiver and then, with no warning, found he was sobbing. Not weeping —his eyes were dry— but sobbing in huge gusting gasps, as though he were being cruelly and repeatedly punched in the belly by a fist that wasn't there.

Their eyes meet and her heart starts flopping around weakly, like a bunny in a ziploc bag.

No one knows what it would do to a creative brain to think creatively continously. Perhaps the brain, like the heart, must devote most of its time to rest between beats. But I doubt that is true. I hope it is not, because [interactive computers] can give us our first look at unfettered thought. It can allow a decision maker to do almost nothing but decision making, instead of processing data to get into a position to make the decision.