Quotes About Decay

The plays should have the half-life of plutonium.

Backward we traveled to reclaim the day Before we fell, like Icarus, undone; All we find are altars in decay And profane words scrawled black across the sun. --From the poem Doom of the Exiles, written 16 April 1954

The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull.

The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B. Once you were beautiful.

Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within.

Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three. What a trash To annihilate each decade. --from Lady Lazarus, written 23-29 October 1962

Never try to knock on rotten wood.

Why does that green guck still spawn itself endlessly out of my head, dripping and clinging in my throat, my lungs, blocking in glutinous hunks behind my eyes: I feel sometimes I am blowing out the putrescent remains of my own decayed brains.

They loll forever in collossal sleep; Nor can God's stern, shocked angels cry them up From their fond, final, infamous decay

If time and space, as sages say, Are things which cannot be, The sun which does not feel decay No greater is than we. So why, Love, should we ever pray To live a century? The butterfly that lives a day Has lived eternity.

I think we are in rats' alley Where the dead men lost their bones.

Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence … Words, strain, Crack, and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.

Daffodil bulbs instead of balls Stared from the sockets of the eyes! He knew that thought clings round dead limbs Tightening its lusts and luxuries.

There's no memory you can wrap in camphor But the moths will get in.

That corpse you planted last year in your garden, "Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

I am the old house With the noxious smell and the sorrow before morning, In which all past is present, all degradation Is unredeemable.

Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.

Long after the bomb falls and you and your good deeds are gone, cockroaches will still be here, prowling the streets like armored cars.

He didn't think of the rot as a disease. His mind was sharp, but he'd been swallowed by lies that had long ago persuaded him that this was the way all good men should look and move and feel. Pain was natural. The smell of rotting flesh was more a scent of wholesome humanity than a stench.

They were hardly fit for life, much less the forests. And yet they would likely defile the lakes, ravage the forests, and plant their desert wheat. These were the people of the colored forest gone amuck. The walking dead. Better buried at the base of a cliff than

The world's decay where the wind's hands have passed, And my head, worn out with love, at rest In my hands, and my hands full of dust.

Better be a bloodless carcase than alive with the blood rotting in your body.

Most people's lives—what are they but trails of debris, each day more debris, more debris, long, long trails of debris with nothing to clean it all up but, finally, death.

It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: it has been complicated, and therefore perfected, by what time had done to it