Quotes About Decay

I spent all this time building a relationship. Then one night I left the window open, and it started to rust.

The mind was a capricious and undisciplined creature. You couldn't always keep it on a lead, and it was for ever dashing off into the undergrowth of the past, digging up some decayed bone of memory, and bringing it back, with tail wagging, to lay it at your feet.

I don't necessarily love rotting bodies, but there's a texture to a rotting body that is un-believable. Have you ever seen a little rotted animal? I love looking at those things, just as much as I like to look at a close-up of some tree bark, or a small bug, or a cup of coffee, or a piece of pie. You get in close and the textures are wonderful.

Maybe there is some solace to be derived in that: bacchanal or funeral, after enough time, the detritus looks the same.

Amemos la carne porque mañana será carroña.

Lo de morir despacio y dejar un cadáver gastadísimo me gusta.

How obvious can it be? ... The purpose of makeup is to defy the degradations of time, and time is just a synonym for death.

It was a garden of abundance and decay: the tomatoes were too ripe, the marijuana too strong, woodlice were hiding under everything.

and of storehouses and of freight-trains—destruction

I could write a treatise on the sudden transformation of life into archaeology

I've always been depressed by flowers when they wilt, drooping their dry heads to the jar with its foul-smelling water, giving off an air of neglect, better to look at an empty jar than one with a wilted bunch of flowers.

There was already something dead about him. He didn't rear back in his knees any longer. He squatted over his ankles when he walked. That stillness at the back of his neck. His prosperous-looking belly…sagged like a load suspended from his loins.

Tea Cake went out and wandered around. Saw the hand of horror on everything. Houses without roofs, and roofs without houses. Steel and stone all crushed and crumbled like wood. The mother of malice had trifled with men.

At the same time the wretched rooms rose before him, denuded of the poetry of love which beautifies everything; he saw them dirty and faded, regarding them as emblematic of an inner life devoid of honor, idle and vicious. Are not our feelings written, as it were, on the things about us?

A life of debauch and the abuse of liquors debased, day by day, a countenance that was once so handsome. The veins of the face were swollen with blood, the features became coarse, the eyes lost their lashes and grew hard and dry. No longer careful of his person, Philippe exhaled the miasmas of a tavern and the smell of muddy boots, which, to an observer, stamped him with debauchery.

A newspaper is not supposed to enlighten its readers, but to supply them with congenial opinions. Give any newspaper time enough, and it will be base, hypocritical, shameless, and treacherous; the periodical press will be the death of ideas, systems, and individuals; nay, it will flourish upon their decay. It will take the credit of all creations of the brain; the harm that it does is done anonymously

Huele a encerrado, a moho, a rancio; produce frío, es húmeda, penetra los vestidos; posee el sabor de una habitación en la que se ha comido; apesta a servicio, a hospicio.

Even so, step by step the daylight decreases, and the cicerone's droning voice grows hollower as the traveler descends into the Catacombs. The comparison holds good! Who shall say which is more ghastly, the sight of the bleached skulls or of dried-up human hearts?

Beauty doesn't keep, but rots like apples.

Great effort is required to arrest decay and restore vigor. One must exercise proper deliberation, plan carefully before making a move, and be alert in guarding against relapse following a renaissance.

Era siempre la misma madre, pero ya envilecida por su propia alma vieja, la morfina y la pobreza.

On the basis of biological, sociological, and historical knowledge, we should recognize that the individual self is subject to death or decay, but the sum total of individual achievement, for better or worse, lives on in the immortality of The Larger.

Flesh, bodies, nerves, legs… things were getting all mixed up in his mind. It seemed to be filled with flesh, cloyed with the sweetish smell of flesh that is torn open and over which blood is pouring. It was his flesh, their flesh, lying about still alive, but dying, dying so slowly, dying so fast…

He had revealed the morbid psychology of the mind which has attained the October of its sensations, recounted the symptoms of souls summoned by grief and licensed by spleen, and shown the increasing decay of impressions while the enthusiasms and beliefs of youth are enfeebled and the only thing remaining is the arid memories of miseries borne, intolerances endured and affronts suffered by intelligences oppressed by a ridiculous destiny.