Quotes About Decay

Pitiful little bodies underneath the sheets, the unclaimed, the starvelings found huddled in alleys, still hugging themselves in death until rigor passed and then, in the formalin bath of the cadaver tank with their fellows, they let themselves go at last.

New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.

The moral universe had not so much decayed here. It had been inverted, like some black hole, under the pressure of all the Earth's malice - a place where tribes and histories were sucked in and vaporized, and language flew inside out.

which seemed to hover in a limbo between creation and decay...

for our sin God had visited our bodies with the gruesome ignominy of rot and decay, there was no indignity in the same body's receiving

Yes, like watching someone flog a dead horse into obedience," Settembrini scoffed; to which Naphta replied that since for our sin God had visited our bodies with the gruesome ignominy of rot and decay, there was no indignity in the same body's receiving an occasional beating—which immediately brought them to the topic of cremation.

Love is always simply itself, both as a subtle affirmation of life and as the highest passion; love is our sympathy with organic life, the touchingly lustful embrace of what is destined to decay

the idea that one can seriously cultivate his own personal freedom merely by discarding inhibitions and obligations, to live in self-centered spontaneity, results in the complete decay of the true self and of its capacity for freedom.

Oh, ever thus, from childhood's hour, I 've seen my fondest hopes decay; I never loved a tree or flower But 't was the first to fade away. I never nurs'd a dear gazelle, To glad me with its soft black eye, But when it came to know me well And love me, it was sure to die.

Doc remembered how Polaroids have no negatives and the life of the prints is limited. These, he noticed, were already beginning to shift color and fade.

One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living... and with each one, he thinks he feels patterns on his cortex going dark, settling to sleep forever, parts of whoever he's been losing all definition, reverting to dumb chemistry...

In the Occident the city has been the greatest opportunity and the worst influence; a place of creation and decay, of freedom and subjection, of riches and poverty, of splendor and misery, of communion and lonesomeness—an optimal milieu for talent, character, vice and corruption. Eric Hoffer

Plants grew in the corners of the room, pale pink pods that occasionally liked to dine on warm meat through some corrosive process Dominic didn't want to understand.

For you, he is the seed of destruction.

When a great house is about to crumble, a stick cannot keep it from falling.

Human beings suck the life out of everything that's beautiful.

Fossils do not require long ages to form. In fact, they must form quickly, otherwise the organism's softer tissues and even bones suffer decay (shells or teeth enamel naturally take longer to disintegrate).

Freud had also ended up discovering this when he wrote: "Whatever is conscious wears out. What is unconscious remains unalterable. But once it is freed, it too falls to ruin.

Dr. Henry Lodge, coauthor of Younger Next Year, makes the point sharply. "It turns out," he says, "that 70% of American aging is not real aging. It's just decay. It's rot from the stuff that we do.

The "guest house" was a creaking carcass of a shed that was being slowly sucked into the muddy ground.

Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately it also brought mortis.

An important step, far-reaching in its consequences, was taken when man first sought the cause of change and decay in things themselves and in the laws which appeared to govern things, rather than in powers and forces outside of and beyond them. When the question was first asked, What is it that persists amid all changes and that underlies every change? a new era was about to dawn in the history of man's wonder and his desire to know.

What is Death, so it be but glorious? 'Tis a sunset; And mortals may be happy to resemble The Gods but in decay.

There is, after all, a fine line between being pampered and being embalmed.