Quotes About Decay

Los cadáveres se quedaban allí, con su ropa negra, devorados por las ratas y los gusanos, derretidos por el sol, anegados por las lluvias. Eran el abono del miedo.

Now, the tourist hot spots of the city were the very parts that made it like everywhere else. Was it possible to imagine those buildings without inhaling the animal-fat stink of McDonald's or KFC? He never thought London would cease to appeal to him, but the little faded glory it still possessed was being scuffed away by the dead hand of globalization. On his down days he saw London as a crumbling ancient house, slowly collapsing under the weight of its own past.

You may be decay and a platitude Of flesh, but I have no other such memory of life.

Ich legte mich auf den Boden und hörte die Welt ihre Runden drehn im Gleichschritt der Verwesung.

The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather-beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins.

I suppose," says Jeremy, "what I don't like is that the moment you fix something, it starts to break down again, that an engine works against itself. By its very act of running, it weakens itself, tries to come undone. Everything is slowly worked loose by the vibrations of the moving engine." Just like us, thinks Harriet.

A corpse is seldom attractive.

Her gingerbread keeps and keeps. It outlasts all daintier gifts. Flowers wilt and shed mottled petals, mold blooms greenish-white on chocolate truffles, and Harriet's gingerbread hunkers down in its tin, no more attractive than the day it arrived, but no more repellent either.

We do not speak. We have gone down along the side of the river slowly, as if we were climbing towards the stone seat of the wall. The distances have altered. This seat, for instance, we meet it sooner than we thought we should, like some one in the dark; but it is the seat all right. The rose-tree which grew above it has withered away and become a crown of thorns.

Human contact wears things out with disheartening slowness.

At the touch of mankind, things wear away with heartbreaking slowness.

Before crime is committed conscience must be corrupted, and every bad man who succeeds in reaching a high point of wickedness begins with this.

Kingdoms are but cares,State is devoid of stay;Riches are ready snares,And hasten to decay.

Behold the grapes and all the fruits that Autumn gives today, as robed in red and gold, she rules, the Empress of Decay!

The vessel, though her masts be firm,Beneath her copper bears a worm.

L'anecdote, cette moisissure qui se forme sur tous les livres.

interrelated. In contrast to the Western approach of treating history as a process of modernity achieving a series of absolute victories over evil and backwardness, the traditional Chinese view of history emphasized a cyclical process of decay and rectification, in which nature and the world can be understood but not completely mastered.

The penalty for excessive ambition – what the Greeks called hubris – is exhaustion, while the price for resting on one's laurels is progressive insignificance and eventual decay.

You can still function as a living ruin.

Life is death in slow motion.

When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it?

In town a man can live for a hundred years without noticing that he has long been dead and has rotten away.

He saw nothing but death or the advance towards death in everything.

maggot gnaws the cabbage, but it dies before it's done; so the old folks used to say," he added