Quotes About Decay

What man calls civilization always results in deserts.

... Rebel against the flesh and bone, The word of the blood, the wily skin, And the maggot no man can slay.

Man's wretched state, That floures so fresh at morne, and fades at evening late.

The decay of giving is today matched by a hardness towards receiving.

One of the reasons that the area would never be renovated, however, was the council's insistence that each house had three large plastic trash-bins on wheels, each a bright color: green for the bottles left over from last night's drunken orgy, red for stolen goods now surplus to requirements, purple for dead bodies and used syringes, all in fact that a modern British urban household needs to disembarrass itself of.

To paraphrase Burke, all that is necessary for barbarism to triumph is for civilised men to do nothing: but in fact for the past few decades, civilised men have done worse than nothing—they have actively thrown in their lot with the barbarians.

Havana is like Beirut, without having gone through the civil war to achieve the destruction.

But the decay was there, deep and bitter. There was no getting rid of it. She would never be happy again. There might be moments. Small rewards that brought pleasure, but true happiness seemed forever beyond her grasp. And maybe deep down she knew it.

I love her still, for if you know anything about that kind of feeling, you know how close it is connected to hopelessness and thus is about the only thing in civilization that don't degenerate with time.

Rome fell because of inner weakness, either social or spiritual; or Rome fell because of outer pressure—the barbarian hordes. What we can say with confidence is that Rome fell gradually and that Romans for many decades scarcely noticed what was happening.

He that loves a rosy cheek,Or a coral lip admires,Or, from starlike eyes, doth seekFuel to maintain his fires;As old Time makes these decay,So his flames must waste away.

It is singular how long the rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly.

The kind of world I'm endlessly going on about is pretty well doomed, but nevertheless I think there are recesses of it worth celebrating.

I heard that after you throw away a 'New York Times,' it takes over a hundred years for the lies to biodegrade.

So the first thing about the history of rhyme . . . is that it's all happened before. It's all part of these huge rhymeorhythmic circles of exuberance and innovation and surfeit and decay and resurrectional primitivism and waxing sophistication and infill and overgrowth and too much and we can't stand it and let's stop and do something else.

I'm burning a bunch of little pinecones now that I gathered on the walk. One of the joys of life, I think, is trying to decipher the name on a gravestone as it is transmitted through the dense foliage of blue-green gravestone lichen. Some people clean off the grave-growths with chemicals and wire brushes, a mistake.

Camarile ticsite ale Pompeiului debordau, femeile boite, impudice, sterile; barbatii mercantili, mediocri, sarcastici, obositi! Toti zeii repudiati - din Grecia, din Orient, din Egipt - se inhaitau intr-o hora scelerata, rapace, impartindu-si, ranjind, ofrandele sacre si sufletul oamenilor. In vreme ce, la picioarele vezuviului, cetatea statea intr-o rana, hohotind fara griji.

Inside, the floor was made of linoleum tiles, yellowed with age and dusted with brown flecks that looked like fly spots. The booths were rugged red vinyl, an improvement over the ripped and tattered brown that Tucker had replaced just six months before. The red was already fading to orange.

which is a fancy way of saying that nature tends to bring things to disorder.

After lying uncollected for weeks the whole heap of broken bicycles, dented petrol cans, and the rest, was taken back to the same dump where, I suspect, it remains to this day.

We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.

I'm still alive, but I feel myself dying, person by person by person by person.

Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.

These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful.