Quotes About Decay

Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.

No leaf will decay because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we can observe you no longer!—No; you will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any change in those who walk under your shade!—But who will remain to enjoy you?

Teeth outlast everything. Death is nothing to a tooth. Hundreds of years in acidic soil just keeps a tooth clean. A fire that burns away hair and flesh and even bone leaves teeth dazzling like daisies in the ashes. Life is what destroys teeth.

The stern marble faces of these men can still be seen in the graveyards of Hamilton, though they have become soiled over the years from the soot produced by the factories that made them rich enough to afford tombs of this nature.

Always learn poems by heart,' she said. 'They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

I'll tell you this: history is the sound of a floor underneath a rotten regime, termite-ridden and ready to fall. It groans. It smells like ozone before a storm.

If a building has been condemned or it's left to ruin, I get so upset. I feel something really deeply about it. I don't like to see anything neglected.

However, if we examine the Canadian scene closely enough, we can see signs of this physical and spiritual rot settling into a number of our Canadian urban centres with a troubling spill-over into many of our more rural areas.

An urban novelist never minds a little decay.

My sculpture can last for days or a few seconds - what is important to me is the experience of making. I leave all my work outside and often return to watch it decay.

An aching tooth is better out than in. To lose a rotting member is a gain.

It is a know fact that almost all revolutions have been the work, not of the common people, but of the aristocracy, and especially of the decayed part of the aristocracy.

Without work all life goes rotten.

The cinema is death at work.

No man can stand still; the moment progress is not made, retrogression begins. If the blade is not kept sharp and bright, the law of rust will assert its claim.

Memories are like stones, time and distance erode them like acid.

It's as if the moment society started to break down, people lost their handle on right and wrong.

For as the poets and the warriors fell by the wayside the bureaucrats took over.

On the one hand the Irish began to prove the truth of the assertion that successful revolutions are in fact no more than the kicking down of an already rotted door.

Entropy gets in everywhere.

Accepting the markings as a natural part of the urban landscape was already a compromise with a murderous future.

Only entropy comes easy.

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. they would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive. (Dorian Gray regarding his portrait)

He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul.