Quotes About Decay

The state of some of our roads is a matter of national embarrassment.

Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot.

It is possible for great nations to rot from within.

I like it when you walk in a restaurant and all the walk-ins are down and everything is rotten. That gives me jolts of excitement.

We moralize among ruins.

The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.

Charles] Nodier's later view was that fantasy reconciles men to their fate. Fantasy and the taste for chimeras, he wrote, are symptoms of a time of political decay and transition, when the unpleasant realities of political life are too hard to bear. They serve a useful purpose in that they give men hope when scepticism and disillusion would otherwise drive them to despair.

Cities are the graveyard of Mankind.

Nothing's immortal on a road trip of a billion years. The universe runs down in stop-motion around you, your backups' backups' backups need backups. Not even the error-correcting replication strategies cadged from biology can keep the mutations at bay forever. It was true for us meatsicles cycling through mayfly moments every thousand years; it was just as true for the hardware.

we're hard-core realists—we just pay lip service to death and decay and keep right on feeling immortal anyway.

Their marriage decayed with the exponential determinism of a radioactive isotope and still he sought her out, and accepted her conditions.

entropy increases'? Everything falls apart eventually.

Kottbusser Tor was the kind of area that had worn about as well as a music-hall poster, and Admiralstrasse, Number 43 was the kind of place where the rats wore ear-plugs and the cockroaches had nasty coughs.

Life is slow dying.

Yet to me this decaying landscape has its uses: To make me remember, who am always inclined to forget, That there is always a changing at the root, And a real world in which time really passes. — Philip Larkin, from "New Year Poem," Collected Poems , ed. Anthony Thwaite (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989)

they had thrived on Earth for millions of years, but their own waste killed them.

Malcolm Muggeridge captured this parting of the ways in a gloomy piece for Encounter: 'Each time I return to England from abroad,' he observed, 'the country seems a little more run-down than when I went away; its streets a little shabbier, its railway carriages and restaurants a little dingier; the editorial pretensions of its newspapers a little emptier, and the vainglorious rhetoric of its politicians a little more fatuous.'29

Old and ruined, all rotted and broken upThese plum trees function gorgeouslyA few days every yearIn a way nobody else does.

L'idiotie est une maladie qui va bien avec la peur. L'une et l,autre s'engraissent mutuellement, créant une gangrène qui ne demande qu'à se propager.

I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen.

All beautiful and noble qualities have been united in me... I shall be the fruit which will leave eternal vitality behind even after its decay. How great must be your joy, therefore, to have given birth to me.

Rome had Senators too, that's why it declined.

My thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings are all in my brain. My brain is going to rot.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot bear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned. William Butler Yeats                   "The Second Coming"