Quotes About Decay

Lace and ruffles, swords and coaches, elegance and leisure, duels and gallant death. All lies. They used perfume instead of soap, their teeth rotted because they never cleaned them, their fingernails smelled of stale gravy. The nobility of France urinated against the walls in the marble corridors of Versailles, and when you finally got several sets of underclothes off the lovely marquise the first thing you noticed was that she needed a bath.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

From our birth we are all dying, but some of us finish sooner than others.

Hannah kept her eyes forward, trained on two rows of rusted showerheads stuck in facing walls. Sixteen in all. The room was paved with white tile, chipped and discolored by age and use.

The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.

The process of transformation consists mostly of decay and then of this crisis when emergence from what came before must be total and abrupt.

What is happening here eats out the heart of the city from the inside: the infrastructure is for the most part being added to rather than torn down, but the life within it is being drained away, a siphoning off of diversity, cultural life, memory, complexity. What remains will look like the city that was—or like a brighter, shinier, tidier version of it—but what it contained will be gone. It will be a hollow city.

Even decay is a form of transformation into other living things, part of the great rampage of becoming that is also unbecoming.

I hate the corpses of empires, they stink as nothing else. They stink so badly that I cannot believe that even in life they were healthy.

Only upon death does an organism reach equilibrium with its inanimate environment.

Il serait peut-être bon, il serait peut-être temps de se demander si la perfection n'est pas dans l'enfance, si l'adulte n'est pas qu'un enfant qui a commencé à pourrir.

Oh, Fairy Wogdog!' cried Rowsby Woof, dribbling and piddling all over the gravel. 'Ah, what elegance! What aristocratic distinction! Can that really be decayed cat that I smell? With a delicate overtone of rotten camel! Ah, the gorgeous East!

There shall be no more gods; there shall be no more quiet and holy places of the earth; and the sea shall be filled with our dirty works. Your women shall breed like sows, and you shall work like robots. You shall value nothing for its own sake, but only for its market value. As for living, the machines will do that for you. In the morning you shall say, Would God it evening; and in the evening, Would God it were morning.

what makes you older is when your bones, muscles and blood wear out, when the heart sinks into oblivion and all the houses you ever lived in are gone and people are not really certain that your civilization ever existed.

I think my mind is going. It is changing into a cranial junkyard. I have a huge pile of rusty tin cans the size of Mount Everest and about a million old cars that are going nowhere but between my ears.

Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself -? ?and that is what it is when it dies? ?- the body tends to revert to a state of? equilibrium with its environment.

Fact remains—launch determines orbit, and Torres got a launch in life that put him low and in decay from the start. You just give it time and watch the sky.

Oh yes, we Londoners pretend to be all civilized and cultured, a beacon to the world, but it's all lies. We're rotten.

Religion decays, the icon remains; a narrative is forgotten, yet its representation still magnetizes.

No sooner do we come into this world, than bits of us start to fall off.

Religion decays, the icon remains; a narrative is forgotten, yet its representation still magnetizes (the ignorant eye triumphs – how galling for the informed eye).

d) (1850) «De vez en cuando, en las ciudades, abro un periódico. Tengo la sensación de que todo avanza rápidamente. No estamos bailando sobre un volcán, sino sobre las tablas de una letrina, que a mí me huele bastante a podrido. Próximamente, la sociedad se precipitará en la mierda de diecinueve siglos, y se ahogará rápidamente en ella. Se oirán muchos gritos.»

No sooner do we come into this world,' said Flaubert, 'than bits of us start to fall off.

1850) 'From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzy rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There'll be quite a lot of shouting.