Quotes About Decay

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;This sensible warm motion to becomeA kneaded clod; and the delighted spiritTo bathe in fiery floods, or to resideIn thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,And blown with restless violence round aboutThe pendant world.

Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide archOf the rang'd empire fall! Here is my space.Kingdoms are clay.

Sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the age's tooth.

Things rank and gross in naturePossess it merely. That it should come to this!

That time of year thou mayst in me beholdWhen yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hangUpon those boughs which shake against the cold,Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weedThat rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf.

I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

When a farm or a family is stricken, nature destroys what humankind has made. Houses peel and crumble. Tilled fields are subsumed by weeds and grasses. Well-tended orchards become knotted, spectral forests. The earth, given an opening, always reclaims itself and obliterates order—erasing the outward evidence of an agrarian society.

Over a period of time (roughly 100 years) a world power emerges from a global war only to experience a gradual decay in its position of preponderance," writes Thompson. "Global order decays at a parallel rate until a new global war occurs and facilitates the emergence of a new world power.

The flies of some other summer darkening its windowsills.

Things come apart much easier than they go together.

The pleasure-house is dust:—behind, before, This is no common waste, no common gloom; But Nature, in due course of time, once more Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom. She leaves these objects to a slow decay, That what we are, and have been, may be known; But at the coming of the milder day, These monuments shall all be overgrown.

Through a process of outward decay, an inward process is taking place that is adding a new constituent to our

Before capitalism will go to hell, then, it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way.

It seems that the whole world is beginning to decay, and that its putrefaction has chosen to spread outward from here, from the land of the Pashtuns, where desertification proceeds at a steady, implacable crawl even in the consciences and intellects of men.

The world shrivels me day by day.

Their friendship was like a wilted bunch of flowers that she insisted on topping up with water. Why not let it die instead?

Beyond the edge of town, past tar-covered poor houses and a low hill bare except for fallen electric poles, was the institution and it sent its delicate and isolated buildings trembling over the gravel and cinder floor of the valley.

The highest things are always the first to go. The basic things, the animal things, are preserved the longest. The high always falls. The low can't fall.

Nothing lasts forever, not even the horrors in this life.

No matter the self-conceited importance of our labors we are all compost for worlds we cannot yet imagine.

I stared out of the window, at my Bronco rusting in the parking lot, the metal eager to get back to just being dirt. Life was probably easier for it back then.

You have always been dazzling - the life of every party, the glamour girl who dances until dawn." "Well, I am. But I'm dancing on broken glass. I'm Miss Havisham's wedding cake, Kit. A frothy, expensive, mice-eaten confection. I'm the Sphinx's nose, the fallen Colossus. I'm a beautiful ruin, and it's time that has done the deed.

...that human hunger birthed the Civ'lize, but human hunger killed it too.