Quotes About Decay

The leaves had fallen from the trees and lay crisp and crackling beneath his feet. Picking one up he marveled, not for the first time, at the perfection of nature where leaves were most beautiful at the very end of their lives.

A barometer of a moral deficit.

Abandoned buildings are like abandoned people. They grow bitter and start to keep bad company.

How long would it be before the elements toppled these small structures as they had already toppled the broch and the castle? Would future archaeologists dig here, or had records grown so precise every aspect of the recent past would be charted and ready for those who wanted to know? Maybe, soon enough, there would be no one left, no world to chronicle and argue over. All things must end, why not this too? The thought almost had the power to cheer him.

The very ruins have been destroyed.

The ring on the finger becomes thin beneath by wearing, the fall of dripping water hollows the stone.

They either beheld their children sink one after the other into the grave, or their youthful forms, withered by the unholy, vampire embrace of Brunhilda, assume the decrepitude of sudden age.

You can't create life in a place that's dying by degrees.

I die. O my hair falls out and my flesh rots and my bones are cracked by the hungry ta!a'an. He drops me behind him all around the forest and nothing will grow where his excrement from my marrow falls. As the years pass the forest dies from the poison of my remains. The soil washes into the sean and poisons the fish and all die. O the embarrassment.

the dead still obey the laws of physics, don't they?

Memory is imagination, and imagination is memory. I don't think we remember the past, we imagine it. We take a few props with us into the future, and out of those props we make a model, some stage set, and that's our version of the past. Of course models decay, and they change. And so we're constantly reshaping the past. Because the past is us. The past is our foundation.

Yes, tings endure while the living lapse

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! It isn't fit for humans now, There isn't grass to graze a cow. Swarm over, Death!

Other things are probably better off left alone. Like a dead mouse at the back of a cupboard.

The walls were chipped and needed paint. The windows were mostly okay but one pane was blocked with cardboard. There were fleas the exterminator couldn't kill and rats that scrabbled in the walls and mice who left droppings like a cocked snook and roaches that thrived on insecticide, even the illegal kinds.

Jock put his shoulder to the framework and the whole thing crumbled inward with a crash of glass. Rotten as touch-wood, he said. This place would never stand a siege.

Along the wide curving moat surrounding the palace, rows of cherry trees announced the end of their seasonal beauty. Some of the trees were weeping: blossoms in white and palest pink, ponderous with decreptitude, eddying on the brown water, stirred by the paddling of ducks.

False friendship, like the ivy, decays and ruins the walls it embraces; but true friendship gives new life and animation to the object it supports.

It is not death that I'm apparently now succumbing to, but the rapid diminishment of lifeforce from this body of mine.

Death wears many faces, but it's stench is always the same.

Every year lays more earth upon us, which weighs us down from aerial regions, till we go under the earth at last.

Everything goes through the cycle of birth, growth, maturation, decay and death. But all of this is an illusion. Everything we see is an illusion.

When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover.

Dark circles under my eyes sink deeper and deeper into my skull, in contrast to my pale skin there is an undeniable resemblance to a fresh corpse.