Quotes About Decay

For me taking part in the decay of present-day man is an entertaining task and the only one that interests me.

Now Second Avenue is a dismal street, made from scraps and ends; part cobblestone, part asphalt, part cement; and its atmosphere of desertion is permanent.

When I first came here it was a pure country. There was music and dancing and magic every day in the streets. Now it's finished, everything. Even the religion. In a few more years the whole country will be like all the other Moslem countries, just a huge European slum, full of poverty and hatred.

Our civilization is doomed to a short life: its component parts are too heterogeneous. I personally am content to see everything in the process of decay. The bigger the bombs, the quicker it will be done. The world is visually too hideous for one to make the attempt to preserve it. Let it go.

The English, once they began falling physically apart, did so with all their customary attention to detail, as if fitting themselves in advance for their own corpses to make sure they were going to be comfortable in them.

Why do things get weaker and worse? Why don't they get better? Because we accept that they fall apart! But they don't have to --- they could last forever. Why do things get more expensive? Any fool can see that they should get cheaper as technology gets more efficient. It's despair to accept the senility of obsolescence...

she looked a hundred years older, as stale and ruined as yesterday's oatmeal.

The deep appeal of the seedy" is Graham Greene's expression for certain places (he described it in West Africa), and it was compelling and comforting in Old Mazatlán, an ageless scruffiness, a sense of vitality in decay, an argument against luxury, boutique hotels, and pestering waiters in tailcoats. The pleasure of relaxing on a worn sofa.

Eagle Pass seemed a town in decline.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

It's all romanticism, nonsense, rottenness, art.

As generations come and go, Their arts, their customs, ebb and flow; Fate, fortune, sweep strong powers away, And feeble, of themselves, decay.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is the intermixing of different genres.

This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then comes languor and decay.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable.

Ruins are ideal: the perceiver's attitudes count so heavily that one is tempted to say ruins are a way of seeing.

They washed up on some far-off bank, where their bodies were devoured by animals and birds of prey. He chuckled when I turned pale. Not a pretty way to go, is it? It is as good as any, Seba disagreed. When I die, this is how I want to be disposed of. Dead bodies are an essential part of the natural food chain. Feeding flesh to fires is a waste.

There was nowhere to sit except the bunk, which was covered with rotting food, and a wooden stool, upon which sat a large fur-covered lump—an old cheese, perhaps, or a dead cat.

I knew what I had to do. I had to ignore the thoughts, resist the compulsion, let the anxiety build, and then let it decay to extinction all over again.

Doing nothing is not only a waste of energy—it often promotes decay and unnecessary complexity and stress.

The place smelled of sweat and burned coffee and the passage of time, which held its own moldy stink.

The place smelled of mildew and rot. What

She was around fifty and her eye sockets were starting to recede into her face like a pond starting to dry up.

Entropy is the loyal servant of the second law of thermodynamics. So, if we think of entropy as a character in our story, we should imagine it as dissolute, lurking, careless of others' pain and suffering, not interested in looking you in the eye. Entropy is also very, very dangerous, and in the end it will get us all.