Quotes About Crumbling

It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: it has been complicated, and therefore perfected, by what time had done to it

but the force of traditions, as in all crumbling empires, grows proportionately with the explicit revelation, in the machinery of government and commerce alike, of the preponderant action of all principles of inertia...

immediately i felt my body crumbling, shaking so fast that the very atoms of my being seemed to dissolve, and then i was dissolving too, my emotions shattering me, unitl there was nothing left of me but silver dust- and a final longing stare of awe,of passion, of love.

facing the black square of the crawl, I had a sudden sensation that I was in a dream and that I'd dreamed the dream many times before. I saw myself entering the square—entering that cold, wet, dark place with the awful smell of sewage and human waste, the dry, hard ground crumbling, sinking beneath my feet, the straw pallet mouldering in the darkness.

Who knows what crumbling infrastructure lies beneath our sleeping children? Actually, many people do - they pay surveyors to take a look.

The city was different back then--poor and crumbling--kept alive only by the gritty determination and steely cynicism of its occupants. But underneath the dirt was the apple-cheeked optimism of possibility, and while she worked, the whole city seemed to throb along with her.

It was said that [Vetinari] would tolerate absolutely anything apart from anything that threatened the city*... [Footnote] And mime artists. It was a strange aversion, but there you are. Anyone in baggy trousers and a white face who tried to ply their art anywhere within Ankh's crumbling walls would very quickly find themselves in a a scorpion pit, on one wall of which was painted the advice: Learn The Words.

The sorrow in his soul had begun to taste sour. Aged and dissolute, moments from crumbling. He did not know what would come in its wake. Resignation, as might find a fatally ill man in his last days? Or just an exultant eagerness to see it all end? At the moment, even despair seemed too much effort.

He felt something crumbling inside him. A fortress in the desert of my heart, I should have known it would be a fortress of sand.

Every evening for weeks, Amina and the several other Ethiopians who lived in the building by then crowded into my flat to watch in horror as a parade of bodies on the verge of crumbling into dust crawled across the screen. We were sickened with ourselves for being riveted by the spectacle of this death march. We were ashes to ashes fascinated by this movement, heaven bound invariably, for there is no hell anymore when it has arrived here on earth.

Therefore, if we built splendid castles, and pictured beautiful scenes, among the fervid coals of the hearth around which we were clustering, and if all went to rack with the crumbling embers, and have never since arisen out of the ashes, let us take to ourselves no shame. In my own behalf, I rejoice that I could once think better of the world's improvability than it deserved. It is a mistake into which men seldom fall twice in a lifetime.

Washington was still a place to be respected, but only in the way that we respect crumbling antiquity.

What we call "time" is a complex collection of structures,2 of layers. Under increasing scrutiny, in ever greater depth, time has lost layers one after another, piece by piece. The first part of this book gives an account of this crumbling of time.

There is no sweeter sound than the crumbling of one's fellow man.

Conventions are convenient. It is inconvenient to say people are dead when they are alive, or alive when they have been buried, or that the world is crumbling when it is, as everyone can see, there as usual. If all A that does not fit B is ipso facto disqualified, we have to tailor A to shape and size to avoid serious trouble, and not all are equally gifted in this art.

To man has been given the grief, often, of seeing his gods overthrown and his altars crumbling; but to the wolf and the wild dog that have come in to crouch at man's feet, this grief has never come.

There's nowhere like Detroit; it's a modern necropolis: all these art deco masterpieces crumbling away.

Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog where no one notices the contrast of white on white, and in between the moon and you, the angels get a better view of the crumbling difference between wrong and right. I walk in the air, between the rain, through myself and back again where? I don't know.

Morocco: to its warmth and generosity, its exoticism, and its crumbling, pungent, ever-present history.

The basis for a successful political revolution on which he had always insisted—the support of existing institutions such as the Army, the police, the political group in power—was now crumbling.

Lina looked out at the lighted streets spreading away in every direction, the streets she knew so well. She loved her city, worn out and crumbling though it was.

Complain about your crumbling infrastructure and overzealous Homeland Security all you like, but as least you have a system that theoretically provides both , which is a damn sight better for national morale than knowing you don't , and that at any moment some Aramis-drenched Visigoth could climb in the window of your bedroom, unzip your torso like a garment bag and eat out your liver with a crab fork.

The bathroom door had a mirror on the outside of it, and I saw his face in that as he went by. It was evil, repulsive; you could tell by his face that his reason was slowly crumbling. He had his mouth open as if he was panting for air. The black beard, short as it was, made him look a little bit like an ape standing on its hind legs. He kept going back and forth, carrying clothes out of the closet.

'The Crumbling of America' should be required viewing for local and national government, not to mention the local and national media who should be keeping their feet to the fire on guarding against disaster.