Quotes About Decay

Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without the blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.

There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won't complain.

Humans will be like decayed gentry. We'll have the glorious mansion called the past that is falling into disrepair. We'll have a piece of land that we didn't look after very well called the planet. And we'll have some nice clothes and a lot of stories. We'll be fading aristocracy. We'll be Blanche Dubois in a moth-eaten silk dress. We'll be Marie Antionette with no cake.

Hold in, hold in, one crack and the wall is breached. I need now to be finite, self-contained, to stop this bacterial grief dividing and multiplying till its weight is the weight of the world. Bacteria: agents of putrefaction. My father's decay lodged in me.

Spike came forward and put her arms around me. 'One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.

In a well governed state, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a state is in decay that the multitude of crimes is a guarantee of impunity.

Quelquefois je m'approchais pour observer ces boîtes qui se fendaient comme des huîtres et je découvrais la nudité de leurs organes intérieurs, des feuilles blêmes et moisies, légèrement boursouflées, couvertes de veinules noires, qui buvaient l'encre et sentaient le champignon.

The vegetation has crawled mile for mile towards the towns. It is waiting. When the town dies, the Vegetation will invade it, it will clamber over the stones, it will grip them, search them, burst them open with its long black pincers; it will bind the holes and hang its green paws everywhere.

Even more than dying itself, I'm scared of the horror-movie changes that happen to the human body as it ages. I think of it as a sort of haunted-house effect, living inside a crumbling, creaking structure that is full of ghosts and will, some day, fall down.

For too long, this country has been suffering a great moral and oral decay in spirit and incisors.

You can't really ignore what's going on in this planet, in our world, and the way it's all falling apart.

I guess the decay of a corpse is progress, too . . . from the point of view of the bacteria.

Dat zou pas een boek zijn. Nog tijdens het lezen mag het papier verbrokkelen en rotten. Of nee, de inkt vergaat. Dat ware nog het mooist. Je bent onder aan een bladzijde, de duim waarmee je het boek vasthoudt, bevindt zich rechts onderaan, vlak onder het laatste woord, je blikt omhoog, naar de bladzijde die je net hebt gelezen, en de bovenste regel is al helemaal verdwenen, opgeslokt door de blankheid van zijn blad.

skin the off-white of a dirty motel sheet.

The easiest way to destroy a country is from within.

The evening shadows made my home look as if it were dying.

What are these things that this houses, Eva?" Rovender picked up a crumbling tome. He handed it to her. "These are books," Eva said as the yellowed bits of paper flaked away in her hands to rest on the floor. "It's what humans used to put all of their writing in long ago.

The folly of humankind is that it believes it is impervious to decay

They retained their wooden souls, and the curve of their backs had the enigmatic shape of growth itself and remained a part of the decaying forest

Man gjemmer ting og så begynner det å lukte.

You know, this country was always pretty much a whorehouse, but at least it used to have some promise. Now it's just a shithole.

Dissipation is actually much worse than cataclysm.

I thought you said you wre bringing a dead body in for examination. Didn't you think to check he actually was dead first?' Gwen knew he was being sarcastic, but the tone still stung. 'Be fair, Jack,' said Owen from the doorway.'Y'know the guy had done a lot to make himself look dead: lain in a bog for forty years, decayed himself, let the worms in, shrivelled up a bit, stopped breathing, no circulation, all major organs dried up and inactive. Could've fooled anyone.

when mediocrity follows talent, and the pattern remains the same, decay is inevitable.