Rotten Heart Quotes & Sayings

I would not knock old fellows in the dust
But there lay Captain Carpenter on his back
His weapons were the old heart in his bust
And a blade shook between rotten teeth alack. — John Crowe Ransom

My moods were a slingshot; after being locked-down and anesthetized for years my heart was zinging and slamming itself around like a bee under a glass, everything bright, sharp, confusing, wrong-but it was a clean pain as opposed to the dull misery that had plagued me for years under the drugs like a rotten tooth, the sick dirty ache of something spoiled. — Donna Tartt

The blood weeps from my heart when I do shape,
In forms imaginary, th' unguided days
And rotten times that you shall look upon
When I am sleeping with my ancestors. — William Shakespeare

My heart had made its decision and there was no going back. Still, it was hard not to be all bitter and betrayed over his announcement. I didn't even have the luxury of being able to get blind rotten drunk. And believe me, dealing with all this sober sucked. — Kylie Scott

That's the funny thing about doubt." "What do you mean?" "It makes you feel rotten as hell. But if anyone bothered to think about it, it's a symptom of love. It means it matters to you. It's the brain questioning the wisdom of the heart. It doesn't mean the heart doesn't know better all along, it only means the brain doesn't understand how. — Suzanne Rindell

Symptoms are never just secondary failures or distortions of the basically sound System - they are indicators that there is something "rotten" (antagonistic, inconsistent) in the very heart of the System. — Slavoj Zizek

Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we've ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight of ourselves. — Banana Yoshimoto

You wake up one morning and there it is, sitting in an old plaid bathrobe in your kitchen, unpleasant and unshaved. You look at it, heart sinking. Madness is a rotten guest. — Marya Hornbacher

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

Are you sure you can prevent yourself from falling in love one of these days? Such things do happen, you know, even to the most prudent men.'
Simon gave him a strange, one might even have thought a hostile, look.
I should tear it out of my heart as I'd wrench out of my mouth a rotten tooth. — W. Somerset Maugham

How I hate this world. I would like to tear it apart with my own two hands if I could. I would like to dismantle the universe star by star, like a treeful of rotten fruit. Nor do I believe in progress. A vermin-eaten saint scratching his filth for heaven is better off than you damned in clean linen. Progress doubles our tenure in a vale of tears. Man is a mistake, to be corrected only by his abolition, which he gives promise of seeing to himself. Oh, let him pass, and leave the earth to the flowers that carpet the earth wherever he explodes his triumphs. Man is inconsolable, thanks to that eternal "Why?" when there is no Why, that question mark twisted like a fishhook in the human heart. "Let there be light," we cry, and only the dawn breaks. — Peter De Vries

He looked like every glossy frat boy in every nerd movie ever made, like every popular town boy who'd ever looked right through her in high school, like every rotten rich kid who'd ever belonged where she hadn't.
My mama warned me about guys like you.
He turned to her as if he'd heard her and took off his sunglasses, and she went down the steps to meet him, wiping her sweaty palms on her dust-smeared khaki shorts. "Hi, I'm Sophie Dempsey," she said, flashing the Dempsey gotta-love-me grin as she held out her hot, grimy hand, and after a moment he took it.
His hand was clean and cool and dry, and her heart pounded harder as she looked into his remote, gray eyes.
"Hello, Sophie Dempsey," her worst nightmare said. "Welcome to Temptation. — Jennifer Crusie

From the moment she'd taken the stage, my eyes had followed her. Probably because she was tall and blonde and wealthy, a prime example of an American princess-type. I bet she was popular and the quarterbacks girlfriend. I bet she had a pet Chihuahua she carried around in her purse. No doubt, her parents gave her anything her heart desired. She was spoiled rotten and didn't know shit about the real world. Nora Blakely was everything I avoided when it came to girls. — Ilsa Madden-Mills

She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work. Trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people's liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own persons. The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich and their hangers-on, the suffrage was become a mere machine, which they used as they chose. There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket. — Stephen Kinzer

The panicked feeling of a guilty conscience never squeezes at your heart or wakes you in the middle of the night. Despite your lifestyle, you never feel irresponsible, neglectful, or so much as embarrassed, although for the sake of appearances, sometimes you pretend that you do. For example, if you are a decent observer of people and what they react to, you may adopt a lifeless facial expression, say how ashamed of your life you are, and talk about how rotten you feel. This you do only because it is more convenient to have people think you are depressed than it is to have them shouting at you all the time, or insisting that you get a job. You notice that people who do have a conscience feel guilty when they harangue someone they believe to be "depressed" or "troubled." As a matter of fact, to your further advantage, they often feel obliged to take care of such a person. — Martha Stout

A man both handsome and repulsive in equal measure-as if his good looks were plastered over a rotten centre, a hero's face with a henchman's heart. — Tom Rob Smith

What I mean is I done some things I don't care to talk about. Little sister, anyone alive's got a collection of those things. Maybe so, but it's one thing to feel like there's a few rotten things knocking around inside you like some beans in a can. But it's another thing to feel like those things are what your heart and stomach and brain are built out of. — Alden Bell

Love letters to the depressed and the future heart
broken
I'm leaving the light on in my old street
Hoping I see some surrender on the other side of
town
Blink twice if you can see me. Blink thrice if you need me.
We've been walking alone for too long, putting all our rotten eggs in the same basket
Skipping in the dark, singing do rei (forget) me. — Renee Ruin

That clock's a lot like the town, she decided. Looks good, sounds great, pretends to be some sort of masterpiece. But it's broken. It's rotten and broken right down inside where its heart's cogs meet. That's Toll. — Frances Hardinge

Lord, you have cursed Cain and Cain's children: thy will be done. You have allowed men's hearts to be corrupted, that their intentions be rotten, that their actions putrefy and stink: thy will be done. — Jean-Paul Sartre

All places where the French settled have corruption at their heart, a kind of soft, rotten glow, like the phosphorescence of decaying wood, that is oddly attractive. — Anne Rivers Siddons

Then he had kept himself to himself, "in the way you might stick by a tree, which might be rotten, but at least it's a tree," and heart and understanding had been dismissed, pushed into the background. — Thomas Bernhard

Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place. — Rumi

Who knew it was in my power to make anyone so happy? Or that I could ever be so happy myself? My moods were a slingshot; after being locked-down and anesthetized for years my heart was zinging and slamming itself around like a bee under a glass, everything bright, sharp, confusing, wrong - but it was a clean pain as opposed to the dull misery that had plagued me for years under the drugs like a rotten tooth, the sick dirty ache of something spoiled. The clarity was exhilarating; it was as if I'd removed a pair of smudged-up glasses that fuzzed everything I saw. All summer long I had been practically delirious: tingling, daffy, energized, running on gin and shrimp cocktail and the invigorating whock of tennis balls. And all I could think was Kitsey, Kitsey, Kitsey! — Donna Tartt

They say this fruit be like unto the world / So sweet. Or like, say I, the heart of man / So red without and yet within, unclue'd / We find the worm, the rot, the flaw. / However glows his bloom the bite / Proves many a man be rotten at the core. — Terry Pratchett

Grigorii spared a single glance in his brother's direction. If looks were daggers, that one would've
sliced straight through the volhv's heart. "Here it comes. 'My oldest son . . .'"
"Is a doctor," Evdokia finished in a singsong voice. "And my daughter is an attorney."
Vasiliy raised his chin. "Jealousy is bad for you. Poisons the heart."
"Aha!" Evdokia slapped the table. "How about your youngest, the musician? How is he doing?"
"Yes, what is Vyacheslav doing lately?" Grigorii asked. "Didn't I see him with a black eye yesterday?
Did he whistle a tree onto himself?"
Oh boy.
Curran opened his mouth. Next to him Jim shook his head. His expression looked suspiciously like
fear.
"He is young," Vasiliy said.
"He is spoiled rotten," Evdokia barked. "He spends all his time trying to kill my cat. One child is a
doctor, the other is an attorney, the third is a serial killer in training. — Ilona Andrews

It's like that club, just a delusional waste of time. Sure, it looks pretty, but it only hides a heart that's rotten to the core, — A Meredith Walters

I can't even fathom myself from twenty-four hours ago. I was so busy following my rotten little heart, Disney princess-style. I did end up in a palace, so that's cool. — Stefan Bachmann

Standing there in-between two disgusting Dumpsters in some crappy alley
with the whole world crumbling down around me, and hearing Alex say those
words, all the fear I have carried with me since I learned to sit, stand, breathe
since I was told that at the very heart of me was something wrong, something
rotten and diseased, something to be suppressed - since I was told that I was
always just a heartbeat away from being damaged - all of it vanishes at once.
That thing - the heart of hearts of me, the core of my core - stretches and unfurls
even further, soaring like a flag: making me feel stronger than I ever have before. — Lauren Oliver

Until sunlight came bleeding up over the horizon, like more acid blood oozing out of his sick ruptured heart, which felt - not that anybody cared - like a rotten drum of biohazardous waste at the very bottom of a landfill, leaching poison into the groundwater, enough poison to kill an entire suburb full of innocent and unsuspecting children. — Lev Grossman

Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles. — Jack London

An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart. — William Shakespeare

The gigantic intellect, the envious temper, the ravenous ambition and the rotten heart of Daniel Webster. — John Quincy Adams