Saltwater Heart Quotes

As their saltwater tears combined with the sea, Lewis finally understood the log line of their love story: He was an aimless kite in search of a string to ground him to the world, but instead, he'd found Wren, a great, strong wind who supported his exploration of the sky.

Two chemicals called actin and myosin evolved eons ago to allow the muscles in insect wings to contract and relax. Thus, insects learned to fly. When one of those paired molecules are absent, wings will grow but they cannot flap and are therefore useless. Today, the same two proteins are responsible for the beating of the human heart, and when one is absent, the person’s heartbeat is inefficient and weak, ultimately leading to heart failure. Again, science marvels at the way molecules adapt over millions of years, but isn’t there a deeper intent? In our hearts, we feel the impulse to fly, to break free of boundaries. Isn’t that the same impulse nature expressed when insects began to take flight? The prolactin that generates milk in a mother’s breast is unchanged from the prolactin that sends salmon upstream to breed, enabling them to cross from saltwater to fresh.

It should weigh nothing. Just wood and air, a shape meant for sitting, a space meant for filling. But somehow, it carries more than I do. This chair— your chair— still leans slightly to the left, still remembers the way you sat, one leg tucked under, hands resting lightly on the arms, as if you were always about to leave but never quite did.

The mattress has not learned you are gone. It still bends in the shape of you, dips where your weight once settled,

His hand that's wrapped in my hair angles my head back even more, and then he kisses me with confidence. It’s slow and deep, like he might not survive if he doesn’t swallow a little bit of my soul in this kiss. He tastes like saltwater and my blood feels like the sea, raging and crashing through my veins. I want to live in this feeling. Sleep in it. Wake up in it.

I have left so many tears at the ocean that I started to wonder if that is why it is saltwater. Is the ocean filled with tears of all the people who sit on the coastline and spill their heart and soul out into the unknown?

The day before, they had started eating the saltwater-damaged bread. The bread, which they had carefully dried in the sun, now contained all the salt of seawater but not, of course, the water. Already severely dehydrated, the men were, in effect, pouring gasoline on the fire of their thirsts—forcing their kidneys to extract additional fluid from their bodies to excrete the salt. They were beginning to suffer from a condition known as hypernatremia, in which an excessive amount of sodium can bring on convulsions.

Aubade to Langston" When the light wakes & finds again the music of brooms in Mexico, when daylight pulls our hands from grief, & hearts cleaned raw with sawdust & saltwater flood their dazzling vessels, when the catfish in the river raise their eyelids towards your face, when sweetgrass bends in waves across battlefields where sweat & sugar marry, when we hear our people wearing tongues fine with plain greeting: How You Doing, Good Morning when I pour coffee & remember my mother’s love of buttered grits, when the trains far away in memory begin to turn their engines toward a deep past of knowing, when all I want to do is burn my masks, when I see a woman walking down the street holding her mind like a leather belt, when I pluck a blues note for my lazy shadow & cast its soul from my page, when I see God’s eyes looking up at black folks flying between moonlight & museum, when I see a good-looking people who are my truest poetry, when I pick up this pencil like a flute & blow myself away from my death, I listen to you again beneath the mercy of a blue morning’s grammar. Originally published in the Southern Humanities Review, Vol. 49.3

This process revealed some surprising findings. The introverts and extroverts participated about equally, giving the lie to the idea that introverts always talk less. But the introvert pairs tended to focus on one or two serious subjects of conversation, while the extrovert pairs chose lighter-hearted and wider-ranging topics. Often the introverts discussed problems or conflicts in their lives: school, work, friendships, and so on. Perhaps because of this fondness for “problem talk,” they tended to adopt the role of adviser, taking turns counseling each other on the problem at hand. The extroverts, by contrast, were more likely to offer casual information about themselves that established commonality with the other person: You have a new dog? That’s great. A friend of mine has an amazing tank of saltwater fish!

An American anesthetist named4 Henry Beecher—posted on the front lines—was worried he would kill his soldiers by inducing heart failure if he tried to operate on them without anything to numb them. So, because he didn’t know what else to do, he tried an experiment. He told the soldiers he was giving them morphine, when in fact he was giving them nothing but a saltwater drip with no painkiller in it at all. The patients reacted just as if they had been given morphine. They didn’t scream, or howl, and they didn’t go into full-blown shock. It worked.

Beneath the pulse of fear, I remembered I was a woman who defied gravity, a woman with saltwater in her veins and the tides in her heart.

The truth is that in many places, good, sandy shoreline sight fishing is available periodically during nearly half the year—from mid-April to early October—reaching its peak during the summer months. The few knowledgeable fly anglers who discover this heart-racing pastime quickly become hard-core addicts.

I have mastered the art of vanishing without ever leaving the room. I sit at tables where no one saves me a seat, where voices rise and fall like tides, but never crash against my shore. I nod, I smile, I speak— but my words evaporate midair, unanswered, unheard, like a prayer swallowed by an empty church.

The walls still hold your voice, thin as dust, settled into the cracks, soft enough that if I press my ear close, I swear I hear you breathing. The air is thick with almost-words, syllables that never found a home, sentences that collapsed before they reached my mouth.

I have written you a hundred letters, each one folded into the quiet between breaths, sealed with the weight of words that never learned how to leave my mouth.

You were never mine to keep, only to hold like a palmful of river water, cool against my skin, slipping through the gaps between my fingers before I could learn the weight of you.

We were a song never given an ending, a melody caught mid-breath, hands frozen above the keys, waiting for a resolution that never arrived.