Quotes About Decay

Material things are so vulnerable to the humiliations of decay. There are some I dearly wish might be spared.

things are so vulnerable to the humiliations of decay.

automóviles, edificios desiguales y descoloridos, esqueletos de avisos luminosos flotando en la neblina, el mediodía gris. ¿En qué momento se había jodido el Perú?

de fraternidad enemiga, de vecindad áspera (como la del olor de los limones y de la carroña humana en Jaffa), lo que hechiza a Flaubert.

he tratado de describir el ambiente de lenta mutilación y suave podredumbre que vivió el Perú durante el ochenio.

And all his molecules were broken down into other molecules and they went into the earth and were eaten by worms and went into the plants and if we go and dig in the same place in 10 years there will be nothing except his skeleton left. And in 1,000 years even his skeleton will be gone. But that is all right because he is a part of the flowers and the apple tree and the hawthorn bush now.

Lo que de verdad pasa cuando te mueres es que tu cerebro deja de funcionar y el cuerpo se pudre, ... Todas sus moléculas se descompusieron en otras moléculas y pasaron a la tierra y se las comieron los gusanos y pasaron a las plantas. Si vamos y cavamos al cabo de 1000 años, hasta el esqueleto habrá desaparecido. Pero eso está bien, porque ahora forma parte de las flores y del manzano y del matorral de espino.

One way of seeing all this was as a symptom of postmillennial decay, the degradation of public discourse, and the encroachment of celebrity worship into the arena of national affairs. Another way of looking at it was as an indication of the GOP's state of disarray. Then there was the way Trump perceived the thing: as a manifestation of his magnificence...

Under my spine, the sycamore roots suck watery salts. Root tips thrust and squirm between particles of soil, probing minutely; from their roving, burgeoning tissues spring infinitesimal root hairs, transparent and hollow, which affix themselves to specks of grit and sip. These runnels run silent and deep; the whole earth trembles, rent and fissured, hurled and drained. I wonder what happens to root systems when trees die. Do those spread blind networks starve, starve in the midst

What's left of her former glories, her days of empire, are in ruins, but those ruins continue to enchant us. You fall into a trance here.

It's a stinking world because it lets the young get on to the old like you done, and there's no law nor order no more.

Senile decay seemed already to have laid its hand on him while he was still in the grip of arrested development.

Not only are mortals rotten, the very atmosphere in which we live is materially and physically rotten, swarming with maggots, with obscene appearances, poisonous minds, and foul organisms.

Those who live, live off the dead.

La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati.

Castile had the unbending pride of a newly impoverished nobleman, who refuses to notice the cobwebs and decay in his great house and resolutely continues to visualize the grandeur of his youth. This capacity for seeing only what it wanted to see made the Castilian ruling order introverted. It refused to see that the treasures from the Americas in the churches fed nobody and that the vast quantities of precious but useless metal only undermined the country's economic infrastructure.

faded daily. Sometimes she suffered much pain from the canker

My youth would be like that, the slow decay of cherished myths—about politics and race, about love itself—until nothing was left but compost from which something authentic could finally begin to grow.

Much had been lost during the centuries, for men seldom bother to preserve the commonplace articles of everyday life.

like all material things, they were not immune to the corruptions of Time and its patient, unsleeping servant, Entropy.

the equilibrium state of the cosmos is death….

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.

La comida viene de la tierra y no podemos permitir que se quede allí y se pudra; hay que hacer algo con ella.