Quotes About Decay

Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing.

Out past the weekly glimpsed windows, out past the street, lived the world, which had, Old Mrs. Karafilis knew, been dying for years.

Dust balls lined the steps. A half-eaten sandwich sat atop the landing where someone had felt too sad to finish it.

The Parks Department continued to cut down trees, removing a sick elm to save the remaining twenty, then removing another to save the remaining nineteen, and so on and so on until only the half-tree remained in front of the Lisbons' old house. Nobody could bear to watch when they came for it (Tim Winer compared the tree to the last speaker of Manx)

Part of coming from old money, apparently, was having old-person habits, those gross, adult needs and desperate palliatives. The Object was still too young for the effects to tell on her. She didn't have eye bags yet or stained fingernails. But the appetite for sophisticated ruin was already there. She smelled like smoke, if you got close. Her stomach was a mess. But her face continued to give off its autumnal display.

The flash would prove that proton decay really happens. The flash would mean that the matter of the proton - the solid stuff - had turned into the energy of the flash (E-mc2). Totally. Nothing left behind. No ash. No smoke. No smell. Nada. One moment it's there, the next moment - pffft - gone. What would it mean? Only this: Nothing lasts. Nothing. Because everything that exists is made of protons.

ruined chimneys rose above masses of broken bricks

And yet, with all its life, even at the peak of its bloom, the garden was its own graveyard. Under every tree and bush lay rotten trunks and disintegrated and decomposing roots. It was hard to know which was more important: the garden's surface or the graveyard from which it grew and into which it was constantly lapsing. For

These are the ruins of our memories, which loom in our minds like the Parthenon, even as they are decayed and weathered by time and regret.

They killed the world and called it progress.

Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.

And in the afternoon they entered a land - but such a land! A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay.

Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.

Even symbols decayed.

Factory windows are always broken Other windows are let alone. No one throws through the chapel-window The bitter, snarling, derisive stone.

No two bodies will decompose in the same way, and at the same rate. You can have two bodies that are literally six feet apart and they will decompose in entirely different manners. It could be the amount of fat on the body. It could be the drugs they were taking, or the medication. It could be the type of clothing they're wearing. It could be that one has a particular odour that is more attractive to flies than the other. Absolutely anything.

The male has a negative Midas Touch -- everything he touches turns to shit.

The temple of truth has never suffered so much from woodpeckers on the outside as from termites within.

I scrape under a nail and I pull out dirt. I pull off an overlay and I smell urine. It's the rot of their lives seeping into their nailbeds, you see? They can fix their hair and paint their nails and run on a treadmill until they're anorexia's poster child, but they can't fix their lives...lives of rotting perfection.'

I am corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world.

Female beauties are as fickle in their faces as in their minds; though casualties should spare them, age brings in a necessity of decay.

A wit should no more be sincere, than a woman constant; one argues a decay of parts, as to other of beauty.

All beauty that surrounds us must one day perish.

Joel was only twenty-six but there was about him the sense of something over-ripe and gone to seed. He was not tall, and not exactly fat. But once noticed, immediately, those large red lips, which hovered on that balancing point where sensuality becomes greed. His fleshy face was a trifle too smooth and the skin glistened like a suspect apple which had been waxed to give it extra sales appeal.