Quotes About Decay

Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city's bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them.

We would note that ruins don't change a lot: what capacity for change is in a ruin has usually been exhausted in the considerable process of change undergone in order for the ruin to become a ruin. Once becoming a ruin, a ruin stays pretty much the same.

Vienna, Garp thought, was a cadaver; all Europe, maybe, was a dressed-up corpse in an open coffin.

Even while you read this, whole square miles of identical boxes are spreading like gangrene; developments conceived in error, nurtured by greed, corroding everything they touch.

Corpses were wrapped in sheets, pushed into corners, left there sometimes for days, the horror of it sinking in deeper each hour, people too sick to cook for themselves, too sick to clean themselves, too sick to move the corpse off the bed, lying alive on the same bed with the corpse. The dead lay there for days, while the living lived with them, were horrified by them, and, perhaps most horribly, became accustomed to them.

People were dying like flies

If this fail, The pillar'd firmament is rottenness, And earth's base built on stubble.

Holy Saturday is a day of loss, but also a day of quiet hope. "For you will not leave my soul among the dead, nor let your beloved know decay" (Psalm 15).

When there is rot in the walls, there is only one remedy... Tear down, I thought. Tear down and build again

his beautiful body lost to bones and gray ash.

Da qualche parte Didi si putrefaceva e moriva in eterno. Giorno dopo giorno. Mese dopo mese. Anno dopo anno.

He used to say the uglier things are the longer they live, and the ugliest things live forever.

Civilization -- a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.

Venecia, hasta cadavérica como está ahora, lanza una provocación insoportable al mundo de la modernidad. Son susurros lo que esta Venecia consigue lanzar, pero son insoportables para el mundo de la técnica, para esa técnica que invade Venecia por masas de turistas, pero también por la veleidad de los arquitectos indignos de tal nombre." aka Rem Koolhaas.

Y, además, los mejores sentimientos acaban por desgastarse, todo se degrada.

OZYMANDIAS I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand

Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.

For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely grief.

old musicians never die, they just decompose.

The base of the water tower gave every indication of being a solid argument for tetanus shots.

sequestered in a smelly stateroom on a rusting ship filled with kidney-stabbing miscreants

American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.

I guess the difference is that dampness comes down but dankness rises up out of rot and fermentation.

The gilded chairs covered with their worn tapestry were set about stiffly like too many servants with nothing to do.