Quotes About Decay

We all die and disappear, but that's because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss.

Love songs sweet enough to rot your teeth.

The tomatoes and string beans were but chilled shadows. Tasteless shadows. Nor was there any taste to the coffee or crackers. Maybe because of the morning sun? The light of morning decomposes everything.

The girl was rotten inside. Peel off a layer of that beautiful skin, and you'd find nothing but rotten flesh.

He was going to die soon, you knew when you saw those eyes. There was no sign of life in his flesh, just the barest traces of what had once been a life. His body was like a dilapidated old house from which all furniture and fixtures have been removed and which awaited now only its final demolition. Around the dry lips sprouted clumps of whiskers like so many weeds. So, I thought, even after so much of his life force had been lost, a man's beard continued to grow.

People don't just die when their time comes. They gradually die away, from the inside.

He was going to die soon, you knew when you saw those eyes. There was no sign of life in his flesh, just the barest traces of what had once been a life. His body was like a dilapidated old house from which all furniture and fixtures have been removed and which awaited now only its final demolition.

The history of every dead and dying "growth" industry shows a self-deceiving cycle of bountiful expansion and undetected decay.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

I was in Nashville, Tennessee, and I saw - we talk about crumbling bridges - I saw one, concrete literally falling onto the underpass below, threatening auto traffic.

We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.

I fail to see how turning the subject over like compost can do anything except raise its stink.

Look at us. One bleeding body, one corpse, and a husk who's been half dead for years. No one who took an objective look at this room could think it was anything but too late, Ruth. For all of us.

To one extent, if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.

the ruin insufficiently ruined

Iron turns red when it corrodes, and copper turns green. Meat turns to maggots, and thoughts turn to speech.

To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.

The planet is finished with us, at this point -

The smell by now was indescribable, a compound of burnt aging automobile stinks and the natural odors of death and blood—sweet as garbage, acrid as gasoline, the smell of a thousand rubber tires rolled in batshit and then set on fire.

The alley was like most any other alley in a city where the infrastructure was crumbling, in a state where the infrastructure was crumbling. It was a patchwork of asphalt spot repairs and loose gravel over a crumbling base of decades-old concrete.

The alley was like most any other alley in a city where the infrastructure was crumbling, in a state where the infrastructure was crumbling.

Nathanael West's Day of the Locust.

Grant knew that people could not imagine geological time. Human life was lived on another scale of time entirely. An apple turned brown in a few minutes. Silverware turned black in a few days. A compost heap decayed in a season. A child grew up in a decade. None of these everyday human experiences prepared people to be able to imagine the meaning of eighty million years - the length of time that had passed since this little animal had died.

When you avoid talking about one conspicuous thing in a family, soon you stop talking about any conspicuous things in the family. It's like a form of rot.