Quotes About Decay

In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then, in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a metaphor), that horror is imposed on other things. The disease becomes adjectival. Something is said to be disease-like, meaning that it is disgusting or ugly.

Did I feel all that? So much? As sounds decays into inadudibility, euphoria decays into indifference, and that is always unexpected, the way exalted feelings are weakened, undone by time.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art—like physical beauty in a person—is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

As you see, the point is not which class today constitutes the majority, or which class is poorer, but which class is gaining strength and which is decaying.

Growing up in an old city, you learn history's one true lesson: that history fades. Nothing sticks together for very long without immense effort. His own strong house is in a constant process of disintegration. He calls workmen to come repair the roof, paint the porches, replace sills; but even this work has no permanence, it will have to be done again in four or five years. Is this noble activity for a man? Patching, gluing, temporizing, begging for time?

dentist is only half the doctor he claims to be. That he's also half mortician is the secret he keeps to himself. The ailing bits he tries to turn healthy again. The dead bits he just tries to make presentable. He bores a hole, clears the rot, fills the pit, and seals the hatch. He yanks the teeth, pours the mold, fits the fakes, and paints to match. Open cavities are the eye stones of skulls, and lone molars stand erect as tombstones.

Y el pequeño tocador donde ya no queda sino un solo frasco que no sostiene sino polvo endurecido sobre una sustancia seca y transparente como resina mineralizada en la que quedó encerrada y conservada una mariposa nocturna para materializar y preservar la imagen del revolotear sin causa.

il brusio di un milione di menti che ronzano / di continuo, / in lenta disgregazione

Por delicadas que sean, las mañanas envilecen; lo destructible vacila y lo que pareciera, frente a nosotros, perdurar, no nos acoge, menos cruel que indiferente.

Gary is a really impoverished town; it's in industrial decay. There's low employment and things of that nature.

Everyone moans about the collapsing U.S. infrastructure.

I can feel myself dying inside.

For an adult, the world is constantly trying to clamp down on itself. Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in.

Last year, in the year 2008, it just became normal to watch great American institutions crumble, almost dissolve like sand.

Historically, if you look at great civilizations, why do they crumble? Is it because of what's outside or because of something internal? It's always internal. It is.

The rooms in those days were unfashionably sad enough to commit suicide in, and, in fact, that to me was the Château's charm, that it didn't have any objections to one's committing suicide. Things since then had gone steadily downhill

Though I have no kids and Hollywood doesn't exist, I firmly believe, however, that it did exist. And like Rome, we are living amidst the fallen columns and clothes-lined courtyards, in the ruins of an empire of the self-enchanted which was once, briefly, more devastating than Caesar's and still brings respectable families to a hot, windy intersection in August to sigh with unnoticed despondence, "…Well…here we are…Hollywood and Vine.

Certain facts of which too keen a perception would act detrimentally to the life-force are, for most men, impossible of realization: i.e. , the uncertainty of life, the decay of the body, the vanity of all things under the sun.

There died a myriad,And of the best, among them,For an old bitch gone in the teeth,For a botched civilization.Charm, smiling at the good mouth,Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,For two gross of broken statues,For a few thousand battered books.

The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.

When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.

Soul rotted before my eyes.

The corruption of religious leaders, who were expected to be the source of spiritual force and regeneration, is the last step in the of decay of a community.