82 Decay Quotes

Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.

I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding-sheet and her worms to fill in the grave, and her grass to cover it pitifully up, adding flowers - as an unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero.

And while blood's the only language that your deaf old ears can hear And still you will not answer with that message coming clear Does it mean there's no more ripples in your tired old glory stream And the buzzards own the carcass of your dream?

You talk of the scythe of Time, and the tooth of Time: I tell you, Time is scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm - we who smite like the scythe. It is ourselves who abolish - ourselves who consume: we are the mildew, and the flame.

Man, who wert once a despot and a slave, A dupe and a deceiver! a decay, A traveller from the cradle to the grave Through the dim night of this immortal day.

My father Time is weak and gray With waiting for a better day; See how idiot-like he stands, Fumbling with his palsied hands!

There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death.

A state too expensive in itself, or by virtue of its dependencies, ultimately falls into decay; its free government is transformed into a tyranny; it disregards the principles which it should preserve, and finally degenerates into despotism. The distinguishing characteristic of small republics is stability: the character of large republics is mutability.

For ten years Caesar ruled with an iron hand. Then with a wooden foot, and finally with a piece of string.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.

All lovely things will have an ending, All lovely things will fade and die, And youth, that's now so bravely spending, Will beg a penny by and by.

Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.

For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens.

`Second freshness - that's what is nonsense! There is only one freshness - the first - and it is also the last. And if sturgeon is of the second freshness, that means it is simply rotten.'

When the sun shouts and people abound One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze And the iron age; iron the unstable metal; Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster. Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them, Then nothing will remain of the iron age And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem Stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain...

'All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.'

Sad that our finest aspiration Our freshest dreams and meditations, In swift succession should decay, Like Autumn leaves that rot away.

Time is a dream, he thinks, a destroying dream; It lays great cities in dust, it fills the seas; It covers the face of beauty, and tumbles walls. Where was the woman he loved? Where was his youth? Where was the dream that burned his brain like fire? Even a dream grows grey at last and falls.

It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.

While, like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever And laugh - but smile no more.

Most human organizations that fall short of their goals do so not because of stupidity or faulty doctrines, but because of internal decay and rigidification. They grow stiff in the joints. They get in a rut. They go to seed.

'Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably.... It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.'

Virtue is not a chemical product, as Taine once described it: it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key. That, I submit, is what has happened in our own lifetime.

This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven.

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: - Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains: round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The rock-cheeks have red fire-stains. But the place was maiden, no previous Building, no neighbors, nothing but the elements, Rock, wind, and sea; in moon-struck nights the mountain Coyotes howled in our dooryard; or doe and fawn Stared in the lamplit window, We raised two boys here All that we saw or heard was beautiful And hardly human. Oh heavy change. The world deteriorates like a rotting apple, worms and a skin. They have built streets around us, new houses Line them and cars obsess them - and my dearest has died. The ocean at least is not changed at all, Cold, grim, and faithful; and I still keep a hard edge of forest Haunted by long gray squirrels and hoarse herons.

The very deep did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy sea.

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old, The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart, The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould, Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

Like other systems in decay, the Roman Empire continued to function for several generations after its vitality was sapped. For nearly a hundred years our Island was one of the scenes of conflict between a dying civilization and lusty, famishing barbarism.

Withdrawn and runinous it brooods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracks. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue off spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet bears away from a choked river.

it wont be long now It won't be long till earth is barren as the moon and sapless as a mumbled bone

With blackest moss the flower plots Were thickly crusted, one and all; The rusted nails fell from the knots That held the pear to the gable wall. The broken sheds looked sad and strange: Unlifted was the clinking latch; Weeded and worn the ancient thatch Upon the lonely moated grange. She only said, 'My life is dreary, He cometh not,' she said; She said, 'I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!'

Many have been speculating on the future of New Orleans. Reading these stories has given me hope that it has one. New Orleans is an] intoxicating brew of rotting and generating, a feeling of death and life simultaneously occurring and inextricably linked, ... The city can drive a sober-minded person insane, but it feeds the dreamer. It feeds the dreamer stories, music and food. Really great food.

The plight of the cities--their physical decay and human despair that pervades them--is the great internal problem of the American nation, a challenge which must be met. (Buffalo NY, 1-20-67)

To decompose is to live too, I know, I know, don't torment me, but one sometimes forgets. And of that life too I shall tell you perhaps one day, the day I know that when I thought I knew I was merely existing and that passion without form or stations will have devoured me down to the rotting flesh itself and that when I know that I know nothing, am only crying out as I have always cried out, more or less piercingly, more or less openly. Let me cry out then, it's said to be good for you. yes let me cry out, this time, then another time perhaps, then perhaps a last time.

Don't let me die in an automobile I wanna lie in an open field Want the snakes to suck my skin Want the worms to be my friends Want the birds to eat my eyes As here I lie The clouds fly by

Jesli tematem sztuki bedzie dzbanek rozbity mala rozbita dusza z wielkim zalem nad soba to co po nas zostanie bedzie jak placz kochankow w malym brudnym hotelu kiedy switaja tapety

The plight of the cities--their physical decay and human despair that pervades them--is the great internal problem of the American nation, a challenge which must be met. (Buffalo NY, 1-20-67)

Tempus edax rerum

See the sterile soil Poisoned sky Yellow water Final scraps of light bringing new tears So wake, baby, wake But leave that blanket round you There's nowhere as safe I'm leaving this place But there is nothing I'm planning to take Just you, just you.

Dropt tears have hastened your decay And brought you one step nigher death; And you have heard, unthrilled, unmoved, The music of Love's golden breath And seen the light in eyes that loved.

The vessel, though her masts be firm, Beneath her copper bears a worm.

The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance - all strewn with crumpled playbills.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is the intermixing of different genres.

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough! It isn't fit for humans now, There isn't grass to graze a cow. Swarm over, Death!

I looked at the high walls where once-white paint had grayed and then peeled. Barbara had always said the house had good bones, and she was right about that; but it had no heart, not with us living inside it. In place of laughter, trust, and joy, there was a hollow emptiness, a kind of rot, and I marveled at my blindness. Was it the alcohol, I wondered, that had made it bearable? Or was it something else, some inner failing? Maybe it was neither. They say that if you drop a frog into boiling water, he'll hop right out. But put the same frog into cold water and slowly turn up the heat, and he'll sit quietly until his blood begins to boil. He'll let himself be cooked alive. Maybe that's how it was for me. Maybe I was like that frog.

He had been looking like a dead fish. He now looked like a deader fish, one of last year's, cast up on some lonely beach and left there at the mercy of the wind and tides.

Autumn wins you best by this its mute Appeal to sympathy for its decay.

To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

Guilt upon the conscience, like rust upon iron, both defiles and consumes it, gnawing and creeping into it, as that does which at last eats out the very heart and substance of the metal.

Three-thirty in the morning...To Ray Garraty it seemed the longest minute of the longest night of his entire life. It was low tide, dead ebb, the time when the sea washes back, leaving slick mudflats covered with straggled weed, rusty beer cans, rotted prophylactics, broken bottles, smashed buoys, and green-mossed skeletons in tattered bathing trunks. It was dead ebb.

We are finding out that what looked like a neglected house a year ago is in fact a ruin.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Rust rust rust in the engines of love and time

Back out of all this now too much for us, Back in a time made simple by the loss Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather, There is a house that is no more a house Upon a farm that is no more a farm And in a town that is no more a town. The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you Who only has at heart your getting lost, May seem as if it should have been a quarry - Great monolithic knees the former town Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered. And there's a story in a book about it: