Quotes About Decay

Over all was that air of abandonment and decay which seems nowhere so fit and significant as in a village of the forgotten dead.

I'd always kept an eye on the house. I don't mean doing repairs, for as the house didn't belong to me that was not my place, but rather I'd keep watch over its decline. The changes come slowly, like watching a woman age: another line, the spread of crow's feet, age spots rising slowly to the surface. One day the face you know is ravaged.

This was a place of learning, and wonder, and great beauty.' 'Time has not been kind to the place.' 'Time is never kind.

Back to the mud with you, Forley. We're the poorer, and the ground's the richer for it.

Nothing is ever fixed. From the moment it is born, from the moment it is built, everything is always dying, decaying, drifting into chaos.

They say belief is righteous, but to Muslan only doubt was divine. From doubt flows curiosity, and knowledge, and progress. From belief flows only ignorance and decay.

all trace of morning magnificence entirely wilted.

Death and ruin is man's preferred ecosystem.

Humanity is worse than flies.

That's what I mean. I thought it was only in filthy places no one wants to go, like Chernobyl and Detroit.

The projects looked like a place where dreams went to commit suicide and hope got screwed in the ass.

Literature decays only as men become more and more corrupt.

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

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.

A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.

By 'life,' we mean a thing that can nourish itself and grow and decay.

A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.

Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.

And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe. And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; And thereby hangs a tale.

High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.

There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death.

Tell him I write of worms and corruption, because I like worms and corruption. Tell him I believe in the fundamental wickedness and worthlessness of man, & in the rot in life. Tell him I am all for cancers. And tell him, too, that I loathe poetry. I'd prefer to be an anatomist or the keeper of a morgue any day. Tell him I live exclusively on toenails and rumours. I sleep in a coffin too, and a wormy shroud is my summer suit.

A worm tells summer better than the clock, The slug's a living calendar of days; What shall it tell me if a timeless insect Says the world wears away?

Houses have their own ways of dying, falling as variously as the generations of men, some with a tragic roar, some quietly, but to an afterlife in the city of ghosts, while from others, and thus was the death of Wickham Place, the spirit slips before the body perishes.