Heart Muscle Quotes & Sayings

The Magnificent Seven consisted of one swimmer of color, a representative from each extreme of the educational spectrum, a muscle man, a giant, a chameleon, and a one-legged psychopath. When I envision us walking seven abreast through the halls of Cutter High, decked out in the sacred blue and gold, my heart swells. — Chris Crutcher

The law of the heart is thus the same as the law of muscular tissue generally, that the energy of contraction, however measured, is a function of the length of the muscle fibre. — Ernest Starling

She told no one of the otter. Garrett would want to trap it; Faina would ask her to draw it. She refused to confine it by any means because, in some strange way, she knew it was her heart. Living, twisting muscle beneath bristly damp fur. Breaking through thin ice, splashing in cold creek water, sliding belly-down across snow. Joyful, though it should have known better. — Eowyn Ivey

The heart is a muscle like any other. Tearing it down is the only way to make it stronger. — Sarah Skilton

Carisoprodol. Comes in a white tablet like a big-ass vitamin, 350 mg of muscle liquefier for those tense, recovering athletes and furniture movers. Too much, and those relaxed muscles include your diaphragm, then your heart. — Craig Clevenger

And while these pounds were being shed, while the physiological miracles were occurring with the heart and muscle and metabolism, psychological marvels were taking place as well. Just so, the world over, bodies, minds, and souls are constantly being born again, during miles on the road. — George Sheehan

My heart was beating so hard that for a second I thought I might pass out. It was like revisiting the hole where you'd once been held in solitary confinement: a force field of muscle-memory-stored pain and toxic energy so palpable I was afraid that if I stayed any longer it might suck me back in. — Heather King

The true man of genius deliberately subordinates himself, reduces himself to a negative, and allows his genius to play through him as It will. We all know how stupid we are when we try to do things. Seek to make any other muscle work as consistently as your heart does without your silly interference
you cannot keep it up for forty-eight hours. — Aleister Crowley

When Scripture talks about the heart, it's not talking about that life-sustaining muscle. It's talking about our entire inner being. The heart is the seat of our emotions, the seat of decisive action, and the seat of belief (as well as doubt). — Billy Graham

Miguel Indurain, five-time winner of the Tour de France, reported a resting heart rate of only 28 bpm. The reason for this is that, with appropriate training, the heart muscle increases in both size and strength. — Roy Benson

Kingsley watched her disappear from the room, wondering if his heart would break. Logic informed him that of course it would not. The heart was no more than a muscle, a pump which distributed blood about the body; it had nothing whatsoever to do with a man's emotions. But if that was the case, why did it ache so? — Ben Elton

The heart is a muscle. You 'know' in your limbic system. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as 'mind' is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes it buy things. — William Gibson

Do you remember in How the Grinch Stole Christmas! when the Grinch is alone on the mountain after plundering the Christmas of the Whos down below, and his heart swells to three times its normal size? That's the other thing that happens when you become a mom. You feel more deeply. You become capable of a raw, scary fullness of emotion that tenderizes the hardened muscle of the heart. And it endangers you. Because you feel for other people's suffering more than you used to, especially for the suffering of children, as if the love you bear for your child is so outsized that it can't be contained but splashes out into the world, your salty tears brimming the salty oceans. — Beth Ann Fennelly

When your heart breaks, you can actually feel it, an agonizing stab of pain in a muscle that you know for a fact is just a glorified pump. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, the ordered universe changes, the solid ground beneath your feet becomes a slippery rock. The material world that seemed so safe and solid a moment ago becomes a shifting, ghostly place of shadows and mist. Matters that seemed settled and certain a long ago come suddenly unhinged, and you begin to doubt everything you ever knew to be true. — Helen Maryles Shankman

Will looked back at me, startled, and I kept my heart muscle strong, feeling something inside me shiver like a pale green flower shoot just waking up for spring. But whatever that thing was, it was still too new to feel ready to bloom; it wanted time to set down roots. Someday soon I was going to bloom like crazy and then I'd have what I needed to keep me standing tall. — Ingrid Law

No one can ever use his heart to listen or touch or feel or see or smell. It's just a lump of muscle pumping mechanically inside your ribs. It has no will and no ability to do anything but go on pumping until it gives up and withers away or is choked by some disease. Your spinal cord, on the other hand, feels. The central nervous system pours out from the spinal cord, and with it one feels pain. Pain is the most trustworthy sensation a human being can know because it teaches us what hurts. With the spinal cord, one can hear what will hurt, smell the sting of suffering, taste it, feel it, and see the world with new eyes. I learned a long time ago not to follow my heart, the hunk of meat flexing in the chest. I trust the tube locked up in a column of bone, the tube that shows me what pain is. — Joshua S. Porter

Was foully aware of the symptoms of terror. He could feel his heart thumping, sweat was chill on his skin, and a muscle in his left thigh was twitching. His throat was parched, his belly felt hollow, and he wanted to vomit. He tried to smile, and sought for some casual words that would demonstrate his lack of fear, but he could think of nothing. — Bernard Cornwell

Congenital disease can warp the heart with great variety. Valves can be sealed tight, missing parts - or absent altogether. Major vessels can be misplaced, narrowed, or blocked completely. A chamber can be too small or missing, a wall too thick or thin. The heart's electrical system - its nerves - may go haywire. The muscle can be weak. Holes may occur almost anywhere, in almost any size. Studying heart pathology, one is reminded that the genetic symphony that produces a normal baby is indeed a wondrous and delicate one. — G. Wayne Miller

Coming under others has a power to do what laws and bullets and bombs can never do - namely, bring about transformation in an enemy's heart. This is the unique "Lamb power" of the kingdom of God, and indeed, this is the power of God Almighty. When God flexes his omnipotent muscle, it doesn't look like Rambo or the Terminator - it looks like Calvary! And living in this Calvary-like love moment by moment, in all circumstances and in relation to all people, is the sole calling of those who are aligned with the kingdom that Jesus came to bring. — Gregory A. Boyd

Your heart ... it's a very fragile muscle. You have to take care of it, be old-fashioned about it. — Anne-Marie Duff

A champion isn't made of muscle; a champion is made of heart. — Liang Chow

Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I'm a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I've got Tourette's. My mouth won't quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I'm reading aloud, my Adam's apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks of empty breath and tone. — Jonathan Lethem

After Chopin's death, Polish patriots cut up his body to take out his heart. They nationalized this poor muscle and buried it in Poland.
A dead person is treated either as trash or as a symbol. Either way, it's the same disrespect to his vanished individuality. — Milan Kundera

It is very hard to stay alive just for your own sake. It is very hard to stare into day after day without another familiar face staring back. It turns your heart into a purposeless muscle. — David Levithan

When you peeled back the skin, you were dealing with bone and muscle, blood and nerve endings. It was all the same. She liked the beautiful logic of the circulatory system, the elegance of the neurological, and the fierce warrior spirit of the heart. The body had rules and it had quirks. — Libba Bray

If you want it to be, your heart can be your biggest and most powerful muscle in your body. — Robert Cheeke

My heart no longer beats but is a tugging muscle, — Franz Kafka

He smiled. I was unprepared for my reaction to the most potent weapon Haden had in his arsenal - a real smile, one that reached his eyes.
One genuine emotion was enough to unravel my life from the security of everything I'd ever known.
For seventeen years, I'd tried to live Father's way. Each step measured, my words carefully chosen. In his fortress of fears, I grew up - but not strong. I yearned to replace the hole in his heart left by my mother, so my life never belonged to me. My own heart was my weakest muscle, never exercised, never even flexed.
Suddenly, I understood that it still miraculously worked. And it was full. So full it felt like rays of sunshine were bursting through my chest, poking out of me in radiant splendor. Haden spellbound me and life changed to Technicolor. In his smile, I felt the bindings that tethered my spirit rip away. — Gwen Hayes

Myles kisses me back, almost hesitating before he does.
But I don't give him the chance to stop me. It's like it's not me doing these things, but some piece of myself that's been hidden away until now and has taken advantage of my current mental state to emerge. A part of my brain, or heart, or soul that needs to keep my lips moving against his, that's running my hands through his smooth, soft hair, that's pressing my body against his.
And it wants more.
For a second, I'm sure Myles is going to pull away, but I push my body harder into him, circling my arms around his waist as his hands stroke my hair gently, like he's not sure what else he's supposed to do with them. He's close. So close I can feel every muscle in his chest, every whisper of a breath he lets in or out.
I don't know how we end up on the bed ... — Nikki Rae

The heart is a river. The act of writing is the moving water that holds the banks apart, keeps the muscle of words flexing so that the reader can be carried along by this movement. To be given space and the chance to leave one's earthly world. Is there any greater freedom than this? — Helen Humphreys

I wanted to kill them. No, not kill. "Kill" is too dull a word for that which I desired. I wanted to annihilate them. I wanted to tear them limb from limb. I wanted to crack their bones and bury my face in the wet remains. I wanted to reach inside their chests and yank out their hearts and devour the bloody meat as the last stray current twitched the muscle and watch their faces as they died. — Justin Cronin

The heart is a very, very resilient little muscle. It really is. — Woody Allen

"It wasn't a ruse. Everything I said is true."
He huffs and attempts a glare. But underneath, I see the same doubt and vulnerability I heard in his voice when he sent me to the train without him. I also see something more: a damaged and enchanted fairy who pushed aside his selfishness and faced the bandersnatch for me, who looked a train dead-on, who put himself between Jeb and Sister Two, and who saved my dad from having his life sucked away.
I'm overwhelmed with compassion and gratitude and another emotion I don't dare put a name to. I have to convince him that there's a place for him in my heart, too.
Just not yet.
I glance at the wings covering me, at his body, immovable in front of me, then rise up on tiptoe and take his smooth face in both my hands. He tenses for an instant - suspicious - but relaxes slowly, each muscle surrendering bit by bit as I stroke his jaw. — A.G. Howard

Have you ever thought about what protects our hearts?
Just a cage of rib bones and other various parts.
So it's fairly simple to cut right through the mess,
And to stop the muscle that makes us confess — Ingrid Michaelson

I've often said that while gaining muscle can be very difficult, it's also pretty simple - at the heart of it, you just need to take in more energy than you expend, and use an intelligent program. This is especially true for beginners. — John Romaniello

The pattern glitters with cruelty. The blue beads are colored with fish blood, the reds with powdered heart. The beads collect in borders of mercy. The yellows are dyed with the ocher of silence. There is no telling which twin will fall asleep first, allowing the other's colors to dominate, for how long. The design grows, the overlay deepens. The beaders have no other order at the heart of their being. Do you know that the beads are sewn onto the fabric of the earth with endless strands of human muscle, human sinew, human hair? We are as crucial to this making as other animals. No more and no less important than the deer. — Louise Erdrich

I couldn't breathe. I wanted him to keep touching me; I wanted to feel his whole body against mine again. But Rylan was here. Rylan was listening. Rylan, who had cared for me all along.
"Thank you," I said, my voice unsteady, and somehow I made myself move and turn away from his touch to stare at the tent again, my heart hammering. Rylan's back was still turned to me, but I could see how stiff he was, as if every muscle in his body was clenched.
"I hope you are able to rest well Alex," Damien said.
"You too," I said, making myself close my eyes, to pretend I was going to sleep. But inside, I thought, Rest well? Is he serious?
It was going to be a long night. — Sara B. Larson

Courage comes in different forms. There's strength
that's the muscle. But love's the heart. When you put them together, you can do anything. — Nora Roberts

Ghosts will forever put in appearances, as they should. Our illusions have muscle and meaning. The past returns at midnight, in the heart of our dreams, and the rains and the willows forever remind us of the sacrifices we've offered and those we have yet to make. — Tom Piccirilli

The heart is a generous muscle. — Sharon Salzberg

I'm sure once he recovers from the muscle tone and tattoos he'll be fine.'
Good thing he didn't know about the penis piercing. That would give him a heart attack. Or the fact that I had seen the penis piercing. — Erin McCarthy

I don't like to plan. Very often, for me, acting is like loving; it's using the muscle that you use in loving, in that your heart feels open. Physically, you feel open. And so therefore your job is to enter, open, and listen. And see what happens. — Susan Sarandon

Once she kissed me, my heart slowed, and every muscle in my body relaxed. How much I needed her terrified me. -pg 252/ARC — Jamie McGuire

But this here, the valley of sweet Virginia, this is the blissful shore. There is no more to reach for. But, humming, he knows. He knows what he believes. He believes in the strength of muscle, the pleasures of the body, the goodness of the heart. He believes in goodness, and this is a new thing, a gift to him from the river and the land and the blue light now almost black, the ink of the sky pocked with stars. This is what the valley and its waters whisper into his ear, in this evening into night. He believes at this moment, and he will always believe it, that people are good, and that he is good among them. — Robert Goolrick

Muscle mass does not always equal strength. Strength is kindness and sensitivity. Strength is understanding that your power is both physical and emotional. That it comes from the body and the mind. And the heart. - from The Iron — Henry Rollins

They say your muscles have memory. Once you've trained your arms to swing a tennis racket or your legs to ride a bike, you can quit for a while - years even - and all it takes is picking up a racket or jumping on a bike again and your muscles remember what to do. They snap right back to performing the way you taught them.
The heart is a muscle, too. And I've been training mine since I was a kid to fall in love with one particular person. — Robin Brande

I know I feel like Gulliver sometimes, weighed down by little men. There are so many people in this house, I'm a queen bee, with every muscle dragging. I'm the heart of a cluster, black, dripping, sucking, hanging. — Enid Bagnold

Fasting puts undue stress on your heart by cannibalizing your cardiac muscle for fuel. That's right; it eats away at your heart muscles causing damage and a risk of heart failure. Water fasting also creates a risk of heart failure due to the lack of minerals in your diet. Potassium and Magnesium are especially necessary for cardiac function and you cannot get these through water alone. During the 1950s and 60s, fasting was used experimentally as a way to treat obesity. It had fatal consequences with several patients dying from heart failure. Your heart isn't the only thing at risk from fasting. Your immune system becomes compromised, putting you more at risk of infectious diseases that your weakened body may not have the energy to fight. Other less serious side effects include: mood swings, general irritability, low energy, and dizziness caused by low blood pressure. — Adam Trainor

Ingram did an echocardiogram. Eric was on his back, with a skewed view of the monitor, and wasn't sure whether he was watching a computerized mapping of his heart or a picture of the thing itself. It throbbed forcefully on screen. The image was only a foot away but the heart assumed another context, one of distance and immensity, beating in the blood plum raptures of a galaxy in gormation. What mystery he glimpsed in this functional muscle. He felt the passion of the body, its adaptive drive over geologic time, the poetry and chemistry of its origins in the dust of old exploding stars. How dwarfed he felt by his own heart. — Don DeLillo

It should make you shake and sweat,
nightmare you, strand you in the desert
of irrevocable desolation, the consequences
seared into the vein, no matter what adrenaline
feeds the muscle its courage, no matter
what god shines down on you, no matter
what crackling pain and anger
you carry in your fists, my friend,
it should break your heart to kill. — Brian Turner

Obviously, despite hard work and heroic efforts, many dreams don't come true. But if we don't dare to dream and then throw muscle, heart, and soul into making the dream come true, then WoW Projects-and all of the emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and financial riches that they bring will surely NOT be our lot in life! — Tom Peters

A story is alive, as you and I are. It is rounded by muscle and sinew. Rushed with blood. Layered with skin, both rough and smooth. At its core lies soft marrow of hard, white bone. A story beats with the heart of every person who has ever strained ears to listen. On the breath of the storyteller, it soars. Until its images and deeds become so real you can see them in the air, shimmering like oases on the horizon line. A story can fly like a bee, so straight and swift you catch only the hum of its passing. Or move so slowly it seems motionless, curled in upon itself like a snake in the sun. It can vanish like smoke before the wind. Linger like perfume in the nose. Change with every telling, yet always remain the same. — Cameron Dokey

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement. — George Eliot

We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart. — Djuna Barnes

The heart is a hollow muscle, and it will beat billions of times during our lives. About the size of a fist, it has four chambers: two Atria and two ventricles. How this muscle can house something as encompassing as love is beyond me. Is this heart the one that loves? or do you love with your soul, which is infinite?I don't know. All I know is that I feel this love in every molecule in my body, every breath I take, all the infinity in my soul. — Katy Evans

Exercise could be more soulfully performed by emphasizing fantasy and imagination. Usually we are told how much time to spend at a certain exercise, what heart rate to aim for, and which muscle to focus on for toning. — Thomas Moore

A woman must choose her friends and lovers wisely, for both can become like a bad stepmother and rotten stepsisters.
In the case of our lovers, we often invest them with the power of a great Mage - a great magician. This is easy to do , for if we become truly intimate, it dislike unlocking a lead crystal atelier, a magic one, or so it feels to us. A lover can engender and/or destroy even our most durable connections to our own cycle and ideas. The destructive lover must be avoided.
A better sort of lover is one finely wrought of strong psychic muscle and tender flesh. For Wild Woman it also helps if the lover is just a bit psychic too, a person who can "see into" her heart. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Ren took off his jacket, which slicited a squeak from Jennifer who was now totally focused on Ren's golden-bronze biceps. His perfectly fitted muscle shirt showed off his extremely well-developed arms and chest.
I hissed at him quietly, For heaven's sake, Ren! You're going to give the women heart palpitations! — Colleen Houck

The heart is a muscle like any other and the best exercise you can do for it is called picking yourself
up off the floor. — Pleasefindthis

I watch the waves swell and break down the coastline, swell and break. My chest threatens to crack on the left side.
The heart is such a strange little beast - a lump of thick muscle with pipes sticking out. Sometimes I think my heart is made of rubber, and the world stretches it and twists so that it writhes in my chest and aches. This is why I have spent most of my time on this planet here but hurting. Sometimes I think a hear of porcelain would be easier. Let it drop out of my rib cage and break on the floor, no heartbeat, the end. Instead, I get a bouncy heart that bleeds when the world claws at it but keeps beating though the pain. — Emery Lord

His words made me aware that the heart in my chest is a muscle like any other. It can hurt. — Nicola Yoon

I use a portable pocket ultrasound device instead of a stethoscope to listen to the heart, and I share it with the patient in real time. 'Look at your valve, look at your heart-muscle strength.' So they're looking at it with me. Normally a patient is tested by an ultrasonographer who is not allowed to tell them anything. — Eric Topol

Though Sebastian wasn't looking at her, he could hear the note of childish defiance in her voice, and it caused a wrench in his heart... a heart that he always believed to be nothing more than an efficient muscle. — Lisa Kleypas

I know my mind is made of matter but I need to know exactly what is the matter at it's core? Because my heart is just a muscle and simply put, it's sore. — Ani DiFranco

When our hearts open, when we know that we are in fact the world, when we experience the pain of others in our own blood and muscle, we are feeling compassion. — Ram Dass

crawling up into daddy's lap
when dad was still

DADDY

nodding my head against his chest soaking in the comfort of his heart

LISTENING

to the thump...thump
somewhere beneath muscle
and breastbone I remember his arms
their sublime

ENCIRCLING

and the shawdow of his voice
"I love you, little girl.
Put away your bad dreams.
Daddy's here"

I put them away, Until Daddy became my nightmare that one that came

HOME

from work everyday and instead
of picking me up, chased me far
far
away — Ellen Hopkins

Overconsumption is a "cancer eating away at our spiritual vitals." It cuts the heart right out of our compassion. It distances us from the great masses of broken bleeding humanity. It converts us into materialists. We become less able to ask moral questions. For example, just because we have the economic muscle to buy up vast amounts of the world's oil, does that give us the right to do so? When the poor farmer of India is unable to buy a gallon of gasoline to run his simple water pump because the world's demand has priced him out of the market, who is to blame? — Richard J. Foster

He pressed himself into me and kissed my neck, and it was as if everything strong and solid inside me, heart and bones and muscle and gut, softened and melted from the heat of him. — Jennifer Donnelly

Cause I don't wanna be a witness to this life,
I want to be charged and convicted,
ear lifted to her song like a bouquet of yes
because my heart is a parachute that has never opened in time
and I wanna fuck up that pattern,
leave a hole where the cold comes in and fill it every day with her sun,
'cause anyone who has ever sat in lotus for more than a few seconds
knows it takes a hell of a lot more muscle to stay than to go — Andrea Gibson

Heart broken-he felt a deep ache in his chest, like that of a sore muscle, and each beat of his heart pained him — Christopher Paolini

The American Heart Association reports: There are numerous benefits of daily physical activity: reduces the risk of heart disease by improving blood circulation throughout the body; keeps weight under control; improves blood cholesterol levels; prevents and reduces high blood pressure; prevents bone loss; boosts energy levels; helps manage stress; releases tension; improves the ability to fall asleep quickly and sleep well; improves self-image; counters anxiety and depression and increases enthusiasm and optimism; increases muscle strength; gives greater capacity for other physical activities; provides a way to share an activity with family and friends; establishes good heart-healthy habits in children and counters the conditions — Michael Todd Wilson

People get their hearts broken over and over and over again. But they keep on beating. They keep going. And each time they get stronger. Not a heart made of armor, not a hardened shell. They get stronger because it's like any muscle. You keep using it and it will grow, and if shit gets rough it will bounce right back. The heart is nothing if not resilient. — Karina Halle

She loved nothing in the world except this woman's son, wanted him alive more than anybody, but hadn't the least bit of control over the predator that lived inside her. Totally taken over by her anaconda love, she had no self left, no fears, no wants, no intelligence that was her own [ ... ] Ruth heard the supplication in her words and it seemed to her that she was not looking at a person but at an impulse, a cell, a red corpuscle that neither knows nor understands why it is driven to spend its whole life in one pursuit: swimming up a dark tunnel toward the muscle of a heart or an eye's nerve end that it both nourished and fed from. — Toni Morrison

If you could have the arms of Hercules, legs as swift as the wind. If you could leap shoulder high above the rim, have the kick of a dolphin, the reflexes of a cat. If you could have all these, you would have the body, you would have the tools. But you would not have greatness until you understand that the strongest muscle is the heart. To me, that's the soul of the Olympic Games. — Andrea Bocelli

He swore by all that he ever had loved and reverenced that he would try, try with all his might in the short time that might remain to him ... he would forget himself, he would put his own pain and chagrin and disappointment, his own feeling of defeat and uselessness, his own craving for love and intellectual companionship in the background, and he would see if the more than six feet of bone and muscle that contained his being could do any small service that might come his way for God and his fellow man before he went. Maybe if he could accomplish some little thing, something that would ease the ache of even one heart that ached as his was aching at that minute, just maybe that knowledge would be the secret that he might carry in his breast that would set the stamp of an indelible smile on his face, so that even a child could discern the majesty of the impulse and he would not be ashamed when the end came. — Gene Stratton-Porter

They say the heart is just a muscle. They say it plays absolutely no role in our emotions and that its use as a symbol for love is based on archaic theories of it being the seat of the soul or something ridiculous like that. But as I quietly listened to every word she was saying to me, as each syllable shot a sharp arrow through the phone and into my ear, I swear I felt like my entire chest would collapse in on itself. I knew this feeling. They say a heart can't really break because there's nothing to be broken. But see, I once had to leave everyone I loved, and it felt this same way. — John Corey Whaley

Mr. McCleod: And if there's anything I want you guys to take with you from this class, as you're abusing your bodies over break, is three things: the heart is the body's strongest muscle, that the brain has more cells in it than our galaxy has stars, and that the body is 72% water. So wherever you go over vacation, don't get too dehydrated. — Laura Kasischke

Gut instincts were supposed to be the most trustworthy and it was in her gut where she felt the butterflies. The heart had its purpose as a blood pumping muscle, but love ... love blossomed and sparked through the body - originating from the gut. — Nikki Jefford

Other anatomical changes associated with long-duration space flight are definitely negative: the immune system weakens, the heart shrinks because it doesn't have to strain against gravity, eyesight tends to degrade, sometimes markedly (no one's exactly sure why yet). The spine lengthens as the little sacs of fluid between the vertebrae expand, and bone mass decreases as the body sheds calcium. Without gravity, we don't need muscle and bone mass to support our own weight, which is what makes life in space so much fun but also so inherently bad for the human body, long-term. — Chris Hadfield

Ours is not a dumb species. We have put a man on the moon. We have unlocked the secrets of the human genome. We have discovered how to take stem cells and coax them into becoming brain cells, heart muscle, liver tissue - any organ of the human body that needs repair. These are our miracles, and there are more. Yet we have not yet found a way to do the simplest things: To live in peace. To stop killing each other when we disagree. To distribute that which is good in life freely and fairly. — Neale Donald Walsch

In the study, researchers injected a gene called Tbx18 into the pigs' hearts. This gene, which is also found in humans, reprogrammed a small number of heart-muscle cells into cells that emit electrical impulses and drive the beating of the heart. — Anonymous

He doesn't move a muscle except for his eyes that follow her path as though somehow he can see her contrails. His whole existence revolves around a girl who left his orbit, and he was the one who spun her off her axis. — Kat Kruger

The heart is a muscle, and you strengthen muscles by using them. The more I lead with my heart, the stronger it gets. — Mark Miller

He felt the muscle of his heart rip apart, and there was nothing he could do but watch it bleed all over the dreams he had never meant to have. — Anne Osterlund

What do you think an artist is An imbecile who has only his eyes if he is a painter, or his ears if he is a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet, or, if he is merely a boxer, only his muscle On the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly alert to the heartrending, burning, or happy events in the world, molding himself in their likeness. — Pablo Picasso

Associational logic," a muscle rarely worked by prose: its "occlusion, or difficulty," she wrote, "healing me, forcing me to privilege my heart, my intuition. — Anonymous

What happens when you have great grief in your life is the arteries of that heart begins to spasms down, just literally squeezes down like this because you're feeling the tension of your life and then the heart muscle itself will also begin - to get stressed out. — Mehmet Oz

I believe in the power of imagination. I believe in the unexplained possibilities of the spirit. And I believe that the heart, like any other muscle, grows stiff if it is not exercised regularly.

I believe. — Eve Zibart

I wish to stay drenched
forever
in those rain-blue eyes
in those...soul-reaching crystals

not moving a muscle
nor breathing
just
savoring
this turquoise ache
against my heart. — Sanober Khan

If we are pack, then conquest is our sustenance, sister.
He plunged his hand into the coywolv's frame. With a wet tearing, the heart came out, glistening and full of blood, veins and arteries torn. The muscle of life. Tool held it out to her. "Our enemies give us strength." Blood ran from his fist. Mahlia saw the challenge in the half-man's eye.
She limped over to the battle-scarred monster and held out her hand. The heart was surprisingly heavy as Tool poured it into her palm. She lifted the muscle to her lips and bit deep.
Blood ran down her chin. — Paolo Bacigalupi

How do you make someone love you? For the very young, there can be nothing harder in the world. You may try as hard as you like: place yourself beside them, cook their favourite food, bring them wine or sing the love songs that you know will move them. They will not move them. Nothing will move them. You will waste days interpreting the simple banalities of a phone call; months staring at their soft lips as they talk; you will waste years watching a body sitting in a chair and willing every muscle to take you across the room and do a simple thing, say a simple word, make them love you and you will not do it; you will waste long nights wondering how they cannot feel this - the urge to embrace, the snow melt in the heart when you are near them - how they can sit in that chair, or speak with those lips, or make a call and mean nothing by it, hide nothing in their hearts. Or perhaps what they hide is not what you want to see. Because surely they love someone. It simply isn't you. — Andrew Sean Greer

There are some very significant changes in the way the fluids are distributed in our body, the way our heart functions initially, and as well as our bone and muscle. — Laurel Clark

Then Christian made the fatal mistake of looking into her eyes. Suddenly he couldn't move a muscle. They smoldered with a terrible black anger even as her mouth returned his kiss. It was as if they were two separate beings, the sweetness of her mouth upon his, and the darkness of her terrible eyes draining the life out of him. Christian could feel her heart racing, the fury of her blood uncontrollable, and he knew that if she couldn't rein it in somehow, he would be lost. Already his hunger eviscerated him, he could feel the holes in his gut as those eyes, so blackly terrifying - hers but not hers, sucking everything from him, taking, feeding ... killing. He felt wetness on his face.
Somehow, she'd become the vampire. — Amalie Howard

Flex that muscle in your heart. The important thing is that it becomes your compass... — Susie Buffett

Emerson lifts his head. His eyes are two dark pools of desire, a clouded night's sky. He catches his breath a moment, unsteady, and then drops a kiss on my lips. Sweet. Almost tender. I barely have time to take it in before he grabs my shoulder and spins me around, pushing me so my bare chest is slammed up into the wall, my cheek pressed against the cold concrete.
I gasp, my heart skipping with the thrill. I can feel him up against me, a solid wall of muscle trapping me in place, the hard ridge of him pressed against the small of my back. I can't move, or see the expression on his face, only hear the hoarse groan Emerson sounds as he twists a handful of my hair and yanks it to one side, kissing a searing trail along the curve of my neck.
I whimper, bound and powerless against him, and oh God, loving every minute of it. — Melody Grace

Funny thing, your brain,
how it always functions on one
level or another. How, even stuck in
some sort of subconcious limbo, it works
your lungs, your muscle twitches, your heart,
in fact, in symphony with your heart, allowing it
to feel love. Pain. Jealousy. Guilt. I wonder if it's the
same for people, lost in comas. Is there really such a thing — Ellen Hopkins

Four wanders through the crowd of initiates, watching us as we go through the movements again. When he stops in front of me, my insides twist like someone is stirring them with a fork. He stares at me, his eyes following my body from my head to my feet, not lingering anywhere - a practical, scientific gaze.
"You don't have much muscle", he says, "which means you're better off using your knees and elbows. You can put more power behind them."
Suddenly he presses a hand to my stomach. His fingers are so long that, though the heel of his hand touches one side of my rib cage, his fingertips still touch the other side. My heart pounds so hard my chest hurts, and I stare at him, wide-eyed.
"Never forget to keep tension here", he says in a quiet voice.
Four lifts his hand and keeps walking. I feel the pressure of his palm even after he's gone. It's strange, but I have to stop and breathe for a few seconds before I can keep practicing again. — Veronica Roth

There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there. — Mary Karr

Home was where the heart was and Grace's heart was a hunk of muscle that worked just fine on its own. — Jonathan Kellerman

I go to the gym four times a week for 45 minutes to an hour without fail; I like using weights for muscle tone and the bike and rower for my heart rate. I do quite a lot of floor exercises. — Marie Helvin