Quotes About Decay

Seeds blow in the wind and what is earf but a deadness with life growing out of it?

What is the half-life of information? Does its rate of decay correlate with the medium that conveys it? Pixels need power. Paper is unstable in fire and flood. Letters carved in stone are more durable, although not so easily distributed, but inertia can be a good thing.

Does the half-life of information correlate with the decay of our attention?

What is the half-life of information?

in a squalid, run-down house in the worst

The ghosts of sad, cheap souls live on in sad, cheap furniture.

Just before words vanish they acquire a sickening pulpy smell, like clumps of dead grass whipped by the wind into dry little spheres, and they spill from the brain and the vocal cords, down through the blood vessels and nerves to the deepest, farthest corners of your body.

Ci segnala subito che ci troviamo in un punto della terra dove una biologia esuberante e instancabile lavora, produce, prolifera e fiorisce senza sosta e senza sosta si ammala, si decompone, si tarla e marcisce.

Más tarde, cuando se hubieron marchado todos los panaderos, fontaneros, electricistas, carteros y porteros, la ciudad de piedra perdió su razón de ser, el sentido de su existencia. No era más que un esqueleto desnudo pulido por el viento, un hueso roído que sobresalía de la tierra en dirección al sol

And doesn't everything die and return; the grass, the trees, the fields? Why not us?

And turn no whither, but must needs decay And drop from out the universal frame Into that shapeless, scopeless, blank abyss, That utter nothingness, of which I came: This is it that has come to pass in me; Oh, horror! this it is, my dearest, this; So pray for me, my friends, who have not strength to pray.

If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect.

we can best understand the nature of this culture if we say that it found its truest mirror in a corpse

I don't want to admit that the savages are winning, that the jungle is creeping in and recapturing the civilized world--the jungle where the only law is the law of the jungle--but on many days every week that's how it feels.

We plainly perceive that the mind strengthens and decays with the body.

And now commenced the work of devastation upon the many good things with which the table was loaded.

The pride of those who cannot edify lies in destruction

Are ruins, then, already here?

That's the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it's in their nature.

What men yearn for they often destroy.

like the small votives they lit in church.) Sometimes the houses were deserted, even partially destroyed. Sometimes it seemed the families must still be upstairs. There were old bicycles in some, or baby carriages. A steamer trunk, once, filled with broken dishes. A jar of pickled cauliflower.

En esa cárcel que sueñas para mí, te pudrirás tú.

I don't do anything with my life except romanticise and decay with indecision

I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision. —  Allen Ginsberg, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems: 1937-1952 . (Da Capo Press; 1st Da Capo Press Ed edition November 1, 2006)