"Half the ills we heard within our hearts are ills because we hoard them"
About this Quote
A surprisingly modern diagnosis: your suffering doesn not just happen to you, it multiplies inside you. Cornwall frames pain as something we curate. "Heard within our hearts" suggests an inner acoustics where worries echo, distort, and grow louder with repetition. The line is built on a quiet accusation: the ailment is real, but our private obsession is what makes it an "ill". That pivot - "are ills because" - turns misfortune into a feedback loop, less fate than habit.
The key verb is "hoard". Cornwall borrows the language of property and greed to describe emotional secrecy. Hoarding is not simply keeping; it is clutching, stockpiling, refusing circulation. In the 19th-century moral imagination, hoarding was a social sin as much as a personal one: wealth locked away instead of put to use. Apply that ethic to feeling, and the subtext sharpens. Grief, fear, resentment can become a kind of dark treasure, proof that we have been wronged, evidence we are deep, armor against disappointment. If you "hoard" it, you also protect it from being challenged, softened, or shared.
Cornwall wrote in a period that prized restraint and decorum, especially in public life. The line reads like a pressure valve: a gentle rebuke to stoic silence, but also a warning about the romance of melancholia. It works because it refuses self-pity; it admits the ache while insisting we are complicit in its persistence.
The key verb is "hoard". Cornwall borrows the language of property and greed to describe emotional secrecy. Hoarding is not simply keeping; it is clutching, stockpiling, refusing circulation. In the 19th-century moral imagination, hoarding was a social sin as much as a personal one: wealth locked away instead of put to use. Apply that ethic to feeling, and the subtext sharpens. Grief, fear, resentment can become a kind of dark treasure, proof that we have been wronged, evidence we are deep, armor against disappointment. If you "hoard" it, you also protect it from being challenged, softened, or shared.
Cornwall wrote in a period that prized restraint and decorum, especially in public life. The line reads like a pressure valve: a gentle rebuke to stoic silence, but also a warning about the romance of melancholia. It works because it refuses self-pity; it admits the ache while insisting we are complicit in its persistence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Letting Go |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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