Quotes About Decay

Without electricity, the air would rot.

Well, the family always was bright, and brightness, as you know, decays brilliantly. Madness is the most shining way.

He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze; he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height

I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world

But how nothingness invades us! We are scarcely born ere decay begins for us, in such a way that the whole of life is but one long combat with it, more and more triumphant, on its part, to the consummation, namely, death; and then the reign of decay is exclusive.

So when will this society, bastardised by every debauchery of mind, body and soul, finally come to an end?

She still was not happy, she never had been. What caused this inadequacy in her life? Why did everything she leaned on instantaneously decay?..

I wouldn't mind a bit seeing all civilization crumble like a mason's scaffolding before the building was finished--

On the hill there was a poor old tramp wandering about with his stick, in among the carriages. A mass of rags covered his shoulders, and a squashed beaver-hat, bent down into the shape of a bowl, concealed his face; but, when he took it off, he exposed, instead of eyelids, two yawning bloodstained holes. The flesh was tattered into scarlet strips; and fluid was trickling out, congealing into green crusts that reached down to his nose, with black nostrils that kept sniffing convulsively.

Am vazut deci arzand un om pe rug, si asta mi-a inspirat dorinta de a disparea in acelasi mod. In acest fel totul dispare imediat. Omul grabeste opera lenta a naturii... Trupul e mort, spiritul a disparut. Focul ce purificca imprastie in cateva ore ce a fost candva o fiinta Insemnarile lui Maupassant din 7 septembrie 1884

Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains roared intermittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And he breathed the breath of the house—a dank savor rather than a smell—a cold, musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork.

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction.

Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come-but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.

Miss Parkinson lived alone in a big bay-windowed house of Edwardian brick with a vast garden of decaying fruit trees and untidy hedges of gigantic size. She was great at making elderberry wine and bottling fruit and preserves and lemon curd and drying flowers for winter. She felt, like Halibut, that things were not as they used to be. The synthetic curse of modern times lay thick on everything. There was everywhere a sad drift from Nature.

In Mencken's view, "religion belongs to a very early stage of human development, and... its rapid decay in the world since the Reformation is evidence of genuine progress" ("The Ascent of Man").

Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.

Damn it, it wasn't quite fresh enough!

My searchlight expired, but still I ran. I heard voices, and yowls, and echoes, but above all there gently rose that impious, insidious scurrying, gently rising, rising as a stiff bloated corpse gently rises above an oily river that flows under endless onyx bridges to a black putrid sea. Something bumped into me - something soft and plump. It must have been the rats; the viscous, gelatinous, ravenous army that feast on the dead and the living...

One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there - a worn flight of steps, a wormy pair of decorative columns of pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron railing.

What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.

Que no está muerto lo que yace eternamente  y con el paso de los evos, aun la muerte puede morir»

the rats inevitably dragged away the whole cadaver through the hole they gnawed in the coffin.

I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and dissolution; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation, the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide.