Quotes About Decay

The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn't want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.

Here is a handful of shadow I have brought back to you: this decay, this hope, this mouth- ful of dirt, this poetry.

Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble.

Bearing false witness was not the exception, it was common. Beneath its outer show of virtue and purity, Gilead was rotting.

But not, surely, for the first time in human history. How many others have stood in this place? Left behind, with all gone, all swept away. The dead bodies evaporating like slow smoke; their loved and carefully tended homes crumbling away like deserted anthills. Their bones reverting to calcium; night predators

So true," said Miss Violence, with a sigh. But she sighed about everything. She fit into Avilion very well – into its obsolete Victorian splendours, its air of aesthetic decay, of departed grace, of wan regret. Her attitudes and even her faded cashmeres went with the wallpaper. Laura

Time is a vindictive bandit to steal the beauty of our former selves. We are left with sagging, rippled flesh and burning gums with empty sockets.

Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

Onion rings in the car cushions do not improve with time.

We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.

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?

... the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion.

What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?

As the future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future -- a terrible festival of dead leaves.

with the animals dying around us our lost feelings we are saying thank you with the forests falling faster than the minutes of our lives we are saying thank you with the words going out like cells of a brain with the cities growing over us like the earth we are saying thank you faster and faster with nobody listening we are saying thank you we are saying thank you and waving dark though it is —W. S. MERWIN

My love for my family has grown for years in decay-fed soil, unwashed root pulled suddenly from the ground. Bulbous as a beet, a huge eye under a lid of earth. Scoop out the eye, blind the earth.

When the world of man collapses in ruin, beauty will take over. The trees shall grow again where there were streets; the flowers will again cover the meadow that is now a dank field of hovels. That shall be the purpose of the Satanic master, to see the wild grass and the dense forest cover up all trace of the once great cities until nothing remains.

New Orleans, city of roaches, city of decay, city of our family, and of happy, happy people.

What in hell was mortality? Shitting, pissing, eating, and then the same cycle all over again!

I picked up the corpse and dragged it down and down the winding steps of the tower, into the stinking dungeon, and threw it to rot with the rest there.

All over the lawn, the immortals had begun to wither and decompose, creating little pockets of chaos among the guests.

Just as sure as this flesh is pink, it will turn gray, wrinkled with age

I knew that things human would lose all love of this place, as they had lost their love of so many ruins in the country round.

America destroys her big houses. Some them don't even last a hundred years.