“As it turns out, you can function while your heart is being torn to shreds.”

"Like Spinning Plates"
Lyrics, Amnesiac (2001)

"And I always thought" [Und ich dachte immer] (c. 1956), trans. Michael Hamburger in Poems, 1913-1956, p. 452
Poems, 1913-1956 (1976)

"Hearts"
Shades of the World (1985)

Discussing Solon's laws with him, as quoted by Plutarch, in Solon ch. 5; translation by Robin Waterfield from Plutarch Greek Lives (1998) p. 50.
Variants:
Written laws are like spiders’ webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.
Laws are spider-webs, which catch the little flies, but cannot hold the big ones.
as quoted in Beeton's Book of Jokes and Jests, or Good Things Said and Sung, Second Edition, Printed by Frederick Warne & Co., London, 1866.

Stenberg v. Carhart, 530 U. S. 914 http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=99-830 (28 June 2000) (detailing what he deemed a constitutionally protected alternative to partial-birth abortion).

Source: Speaker for the Dead

Source: Someone Like You (1998)

XXI, p. 23
Kenneth Rexroth's translations, One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (1955)

The Lifted Veil (1859); Eliot here quotes the Latin epitaph of Jonathan Swift, translated as "Where savage indignation can lacerate his heart no more" · The Lifted Veil online at Wikisource
Context: I wish to use my last hours of ease and strength in telling the strange story of my experience. I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we have all a chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven — the living only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind. While the heart beats, bruise it — it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition — make haste — oppress it with your ill-considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations. The heart will by and by be still — "ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit" the eye will cease to entreat; the ear will be deaf; the brain will have ceased from all wants as well as from all work. Then your charitable speeches may find vent; then you may remember and pity the toil and the struggle and the failure; then you may give due honour to the work achieved; then you may find extenuation for errors, and may consent to bury them.