Quotes About Decay

He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out.

He smelled of moon swamps and old Egyptian bandages. He was something found in museums, wrapped in nicotine linens, sealed in glass. But he was alive, puling like a babe, and shriveling unto death, fast, very fast, before their eyes.

Nothing ever likes to die — even a room.

Perfect, faultless, in ruins, yes, but perfect,nevertheless.

the city rolled over and fell down dead. The sound of its death came after.

We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things." – The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (1950)

post-apocalyptic world where death provides the best way out of a ravaged landscape.

And then they were at the end of the line, the silver tracks, abandoned for eighteen years, ran on into rolling country. In 1910 people took the trolley out to Chessman's Park with vast picnic hampers. The track, never ripped up, still lay rusting among the hills.

we came upon the bones of the Venice Pier and the struts, tracks, and ties of the ancient roller-coaster collapsed on the sand and being eaten by the sea.

To the destruction of what is.

Unhappy Europe! Thou shalt perish by the moral insanity of thy children!

There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies

A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse.

camino se apartaba de los peñascos y torcía en presencia de un vagón de tren tirado boca abajo; una de sus ruedas faltaba, y reposaba como el cadáver de un animal desconocido

Depreciating motels, junked automobiles, and quick-food joints grow like amber waves of grain.

Man was matter. Drop him out of a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage.

The challenge is, to live in a house from which meaning has departed, like air leaking from a balloon. A slow leak, yet lethal. And one day, the balloon is flat: it is not a balloon any longer. By

Civilization is faces, appearances: when these collapse, civilization collapses as well.

The master bedchamber at the top of a flight of badly worn and mossy stone steps, overlaid with grime, and the hard-dried excrement and remains of vermin—overlooking, from its single (barred) window, a marshy graveyard, the aged markers tilted and filthy from neglect, spiky grasses growing all around, and pools of brackish water interspersed among the graves.

Because it was silver foil and not a living rose, it could never rot and die.

Wake up and smell the corpses.

Across the intersection he could see the crumbling blue-green facade of the Palace Amusements building, the grinning ten-foot-high face on its north wall smiling out on empty streets and vacant lots. The arcade entrances were covered with plywood; broken neon tubing hung from the walls. He thought of the hours he had spent there as a kid, playing pinball, firing the real .22s in the shooting gallery, riding the bumper cars. It hurt to look at it now.

Hier unten existierte dieses Riesenreich voll mit unschätzbarem Wissen, und es war in der Hand von Mördern und Banditen, wilden Tieren, Ratten und Insekten, die es besinnungslos herunterwirtschafteten, unbewohnbar machten und eines Tages endgültig zerstören würden.

Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.