Crumbling Quotes

My people are crumbling and dying and starving, and you're blessing blessed people and serving the saved. ~ Jen Hatmaker

Both could feel the relationship crumbling to pieces beneath the weight of everything that Gavin refused to say. ~ J.K. Rowling

Friendship means never having to be alone, it means there's a constant wall of solidarity even when everything else is crumbling around you. If he's the crumble in your life, then I'll be the damn wall! ~ Emma Hart

Yet if anyone cares to read over the now crumbling minutes giving an account of the meetings at which the Italian Fasci di Combattimento were founded, he will find not a doctrine but a series of pointers ... It may be objected that this program implies a return to the guilds (corporazioni). No matter! ... I therefore hope this assembly will accept the economic claims advanced by national syndicalism. ~ Benito Mussolini

Children listen to superstitious tales, the story goes, that that spot, in the heart of the "Big Cane," is a haunted place. For more than a quarter of a century, human voices had rarely, if ever, disturbed the silence of the clearing. Rank and noxious weeds had overspread the once cultivated field - serpents sunned themselves on the doorway of the crumbling cabin. It was indeed a dreary picture ~ Solomon Northup

Jack, who apparently always had to be moving in some way, had made up for the missing knife by grabbing a half loaf of French bread and methodically ripping it into tiny pieces.
"What," I said, narrowing my eyes. "Why don't faeries like bread?"
"Hmm?" Jack looked up, then shrugged. "I dunno."
Lend picked up a piece, crumbling it. "My dad said he thought it was because it was the staff of life for people."
"Nasty stuff tastes like mold," Jack said. "I tried a piece once a while ago when I was still trying to force myself to eat normal food so I could stay here. It was like a shock to my whole system." He shuddered at the memory. ~ Kiersten White

Kaltain unleashed the last of her shadowfire, tipping her face to the ceiling, toward a sky she'd never see again.
She took every wall and every column. As she brought it all crashing and crumbling around them, Kaltain smiled, and at last burned herself into ash on a phantom wind. ~ Sarah J. Maas

I've been cut down, destroyed, and demolished. Someone once told me that the human mind is like a temple. A sound structure. Compiled by bricks, cement, and straw.
Built by sweating slaves after hours and hours of back-breaking labor.
But I disagree ... I disagree because even the most sound and well-built structures can crumble.
I've had days where I felt like my mind was crumbling in the palms of my hands and I was frantic, with fear and desperate with trembling fingers to put the pieces back together.
I felt like that until my husband saved me.
I want to cherish the way I feel about Elijah forever. ~ Lauren Hammond

As it baked, the blessed casserole smelled just like it did when I was a child, which was likely the last time I'd eaten it. I marveled that the scent of a specific dish could remain in one's consciousness for over two decades. Except for the dark brown hair and the crumbling marriage, I'd officially become my mother.
Marlboro Man, happy to have something warm to eat, declared it the best thing he'd ever eaten. I looked at the mess in the kitchen and felt like moving.
Marlboro Man and I watched movies that night. Our TV satellite hadn't been hooked up yet, so he'd transported his movie collection and VCR from his old house. And I didn't have to get up and drive home when they were over, because I already was home. ~ Ree Drummond

My gaze drifts up again to the break in the wall and the night sky beyond it. 'So why call this the Keep of Ages?' I ask.
'Maybe they hoped it would stand forever,' Linus says. 'It's about timelessness.'
'Immortality,' Burnham says.
I smile. 'Ironic, isn't it, since it's crumbling? ~ Caragh M. O'Brien

We are fast approaching that moment prophesied by Joseph Smith when he said: 'Even this nation will be on the very verge of crumbling to pieces and tumbling to the ground, and when the Constitution is upon the brink of ruin, this people will be on the staff upon which the nation shall lean, and they shall bear the Constitution away from the verge of destruction. ~ Ezra Taft Benson

I felt my resolve crumbling. I wanted him, wanted him badly. I needed him too. I almost gave in. I almost told him that there was nothing in the world I wanted more than to be with him. That I didn't think I was capable of leaving him. That he was more precious to me than anything. That I'd give up anything to be with him.
But then he pressed me close and spoke softly in my ear, "Pease don't leave me, priya. I don't think I could survive without you."
My eyes filled up with tears, and shiny wet drops spilled down my cheeks. I touched his face.
"Don't you see, Ren? That's exactly why I have to go. You need to know that you can survive without me. That there's more to life than just me. You need to see this world that's opened up to you and know that you have choices. I refuse to be your cage.
"I could capture you and keep you selfishly to indulge my own desires. Regardless of whether you're willing or not, it would be wrong. I helped you so that you could be free. Free to see and do all of the things that you missed out on all these years." My hand slipped from his cheek to his neck. "Should I put a collar on you? Chain you up so you spend your life connected to me out of a sense of obligation?" I shook my head.
I wept openly now. "I'm sorry, Ren, but I won't do that to you. I can't. Because…I love you too."
I kissed him quickly one last time. ~ Colleen Houck

What drew him towards the outside was not the student, not the goat, not even the man in the down-at-heel shoes who joined them. Simply the street, like a blanched life-drained cadaver, fettered his whole attention. Never before had he seen it look so monstrously real, lit by the tired face of the moon, quiet and grave. There was about it, as it were, a sort of despairing dignity. You might have thought that the street had been killed by the weight of its suffering, that it had that moment died after long agony. It was old, the street, hobbling and twisted with age. Some of its houses were already crumbling in ruins. For years now it had sheltered the petty life of men. And now they had elected it to express the extent of their weariness. Naked beneath the prodigious brightness of the moon, it revealed all that men hid in the depths of their beings, the little hopes, the hates so huge. No longer could it hide anything; it cried out its despair from every corner. ~ Albert Cossery

Across the intersection he could see the crumbling blue-green facade of the Palace Amusements building, the grinning ten-foot-high face on its north wall smiling out on empty streets and vacant lots. The arcade entrances were covered with plywood; broken neon tubing hung from the walls. He thought of the hours he had spent there as a kid, playing pinball, firing the real .22s in the shooting gallery, riding the bumper cars. It hurt to look at it now. ~ Wallace Stroby

Plum puffs can't minister to a mind diseased or a world that's crumbling to pieces ~ L.M. Montgomery

A woman sacrifices more than she is given, and nobody is willing to take any of the pain that they have caused. Yet she is running at full speed without a break, and her world is crumbling from carrying everyone else's problems. Where are the extended hands? They are nowhere to be found. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

You have major labels that are willing to take unconventional approaches because the old model is crumbling in front of us. ~ Macklemore

Did I ever tell you that my mother and father started out as pen pals? They wrote these long, unabashedly affectionate love letters to one another, peppered with clichés and pie-in-the-sky proclamations of eternal devotion. Despite my father's eventual dishonesty and unfaithfulness, I have to believe he meant every word he wrote at that time, and it was admittedly romantic, uncovering my parents' yellowed letters, all soft, crumbling corners and black ink stains, one rainy afternoon. Because how can anyone scrawl lies, really, in their own handwriting, the evidence of your own betrayal right in front of you? I sat cross-legged on the floor, holding my breath as I unfolded each letter, fragile and expectant, like a little girl opening her presents on Christmas morning. I sat there and soaked up my parents' love for each other, and then I wondered where all those feelings had escaped to. I wondered where love went when it was lost - did it travel far, across miles and oceans and forests and deserts, or did it linger somewhere nearby, just waiting for a chance to be summoned again? Wherever it was, I could only hope it had ended up settling somewhere quieter, safer. ~ Marla Miniano

The friendship of the bad is like the shade of some precipitous bank with crumbling sides, which, falling, buries him who is beneath. ~ J. K. Bharavi

There is no end. There is no cure. It gets worse with time. Cure. How can you cure an institution, we are bricks crumbling in the walls of despair. Death is inevitable for us all. But the insanity is here to stay. ~ Stephen Richards

I did not break up the Beatles. You can't have it both ways. If you're going to blame me for breaking the Beatles up, you should be thankful that I made them into myth rather than a crumbling group. ~ Yoko Ono

We don't live our lives with this much order and control. To represent them in death like this is a lie. A proper cemetary should have big, gnarled trees among crumbling angel's and weathered tombstones arranged haphazardly. The grass should be littered with clover and worn down to dirt in places. Not like the manicured, rootless sod in this place. ~ Kevin A. Kuhn

She shakes the little house, though she knows it will not give itself away. He went back for it. Carried it out. Died with it. What sort of a boy was he? She remembers how he sat and paged through that book of Etienne's. Birds, he said. Bird after bird after bird. She sees herself walk out of the smoking city, trailing a white pillowcase. Once she is out of his sight, he turns and lets himself back through Hubert Bazin's gate. The rampart a huge crumbling bulwark above him. The sea settling on the far side of the grate. She sees him solve the puzzle of the little house. Maybe he drops the diamond into the pool among the thousands of snails. Then he closes the puzzle box and locks the gate and trots away. Or he puts the stone back into the house. Or slips it into his pocket. From her memory, Dr. Geffard whispers: That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that. She twists the chimney ninety degrees. It turns as smoothly as if her father just built it. When she tries to slide off the first of the three wooden roof panels, she finds it stuck. But with the end of a pen, she manages to lever off the panels one two three. Something drops into her palm. An iron key. ~ Anthony Doerr

Not so much that I wanted to give up rock writing, but I also wanted to try something new. So I moved to a crumbling stately heap on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere in southwest France, about 60 miles from Bordeaux: wine instead of cocaine. ~ Sylvie Simmons

I walked back to the window to look down at the people who shared this city with me. The people who made every day a series of mediocrities.

The unreformed murderers masquerading as businessmen in borrowed suits and debt-laden cars. The voluptuous bimbos floating around in an inexplicable mix of vacuity and despair.

The crumbling face of my building looked pretty enough from across the street, but from here I could see how worn it was. I peeled off a satisfying chunk of paint, cement and matter. And I let it fall to the street below. ~ Nasri Atallah

But the chapel, that will never be prosaic. Those who have seen it outlined against the sunset or the full moon, those who have seen its sloping leaded roof-top glisten after a shower of rain, those who have looked down upon the world from its summit, all those who have seen these things will remember the poetry that it has taught them. And while each man changes from year to year, going through the continual changes that make a lifetime, the chapel remains always the same. When the rest of Cambridge is crumbling and in ruins, the chapel will still be standing, the last to fall to time as it is the last to fall to climbers. ~ Whipplesnaith

His eyes flew back at me and I could see whole civilizations, cities that he'd built and cherished and planned for, like the model of an entire world, all crumbling. ~ Lyndsay Faye

I think about pasta in the shape of Hello Kitty, stockings with diamond seams up the back, Marilyn's crumbling cake-mascara, and Liz Taylor's new white hair. I haven't got time for the trivials. ~ Emma Forrest

The strange white world lay stroked by silence. No birds sang. The garden was no longer there, in this forested land. Nor were the out-buildings nor the old crumbling walls. There lay only a narrow clearing round the house now, hummocked with unbroken snowdrifts, before the trees began, with a narrow path leading away. ~ Susan Cooper

[Religion is a way of reconstructing] what has come to feel like a crumbling moral framework in the life of our nation. ~ Joe Lieberman

It must never be forgotten that nothing that is really great in this world has ever been achieved by coalitions, but that it has always been the success of a single victor. Coalition successes bear by the very nature of their origin the germ of future crumbling, in fact of the loss of what has already been achieved. Great, truly world-shaking revolutions of a spiritual nature are not even conceivable and realizable except as the titanic struggles of individual formations, never as enterprises of coalitions. ~ Adolf Hitler

that's crumbling back into ~ Ayn Rand

standing on a cliff
in a silent blizzard
crumbling
and dreaming of kaleidoscopes
all the pieces always fit ~ Chris Wind

...in the strange dizziness of that moment, the statue every man eventually erects and that hardens in the fire of the years, into which he then creeps and there awaits its final crumbling - that statue was rapidly cracking, it was already collapsing. All that was left was this anguished heart, eager to live, rebelling against the deadly order of the world that had been with him for forty years, and still struggling against the wall that separated him from the secret of all life, wanting to go farther, to go beyond, and to discover, discover before dying, discover at least in order to be, just once to be, for a single second, but forever. ~ Albert Camus

I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind ... ~ W.G. Sebald

The United States is broke - fiscally, morally, intellectually - and the Fed has incited a global currency war (Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German-dominated euro zone is crumbling) that will soon overwhelm it. When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is. ~ David Stockman

Once, in Thessaly, there was a poet called Simonides. He was commissioned to appear at a banquet, given by a man called Scopas, and recite a lyric in praise of his host. Poets have strange vagaries, and in his lyric Simonides incorporated verses in praise of Castor and Pollux, the Heavenly Twins. Scopas was sulky, and said he would pay only half the fee: 'As for the rest, get it from the Twins.' A little later, a servant came into the hall. He whispered to Simonides; there were two young men outside, asking for him by name. He rose and left the banqueting hall. He looked around for the two young men, but he could see no one. As he turned back, to go and finish his dinner, he heard a terrible noise, of stone splitting and crumbling. He heard the cries of the dying, as the roof of the hall collapsed. Of all the diners, he was the only one left alive. The bodies were so broken and disfigured that the relatives of the dead could not identify them. But Simonides was a remarkable man. Whatever he saw was imprinted on his mind. He led each of the relatives through the ruins; and pointing to the crushed remains, he said, there is your man. In linking the dead to their names, he worked from the seating plan in his head.
It is Cicero who tells us this story. He tells us how, on that day, Simonides invented the art of memory. He remembered the names, the faces, some sour and bloated, some blithe, some bored. He remembered exactly where everyone was sitting, at the moment the roof f ~ Hilary Mantel

Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists ... but it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio. ~ Lafcadio Hearn

An unexpected sight opens in front of my eyes, a sight I cannot ignore. Instead of the calm waters in front of the fortress, the rear side offers a view of a different sea - the sea of small, dark streets and alleys - like an intricate puzzle. The breathtaking scenery visible from the other side had been replaced by the panorama of poverty–stricken streets, crumbling house walls, and dilapidated facades that struggle to hide the building materials beneath them. It reminds me of the ghettos in Barcelona, the ghettos I came to know far too well. I take a deep breath and look for a sign of life - a life not affected by its surroundings. Nothing. Down, between the rows of dirty dwellings stretches a clothesline. Heavy with the freshly washed laundry it droops down, droplets of water trickling onto the soiled pavement from its burden. Around the corner, a group of filthy children plays with a semi–deflated soccer ball - it makes a funny sound as it bounces off the wall - plunk, plunk. A man sitting on a staircase puts out a cigarette; he coughs, spits phlegm on the sidewalk, and lights a new one. A mucky dog wanders to a house, lifts his leg, and pisses on it. His urine flows down the wall and onto the street, forming a puddle on the pavement. The children run about, stepping in the piss, unconcerned. An old woman watches from the window, her large breasts hanging over the windowsill for the world to see. Une vie ordinaire, a mundane life...life in its purest. These streets bring ~ Henry Martin

The testimony of the Bible is clear. The God of Jesus, of Peter and of Paul, and of Abraham and Jacob is a living God. He calls himself "I AM," not "I WAS." Scripture isn't a brittle and crumbling letter from a God long silent. The Bible proclaims a God of visions, fresh words, and new revelations. To believe the Bible is to believe in such a God. ~ Philip Gulley

But not, surely, for the first time in human history. How many others have stood in this place? Left behind, with all gone, all swept away. The dead bodies evaporating like slow smoke; their loved and carefully tended homes crumbling away like deserted anthills. Their bones reverting to calcium; night predators ~ Margaret Atwood

I know they say that's the way the cookie crumbles and all. But you can't help but wonder why there's any cookie-crumbling going on in the first place. ~ Andrea Portes

Passionately encouraged by her aunt, Marie married Charles and traveled with him to his home.
She was shocked to discover that [the magnificent château] Le Glandier was actually a festering pile of crumbling stone - cold, gray, grim and forbidding. Worse, it was inhabited by Charles's mother, who was also cold, gray, grim, and forbidding. ~ E.J. Wagner

I noticed there were so many people, especially women, who would come up to me having recognized me from TV and say, 'I heard you were a math person, why math? Oh my gosh, I could never do math!' I could just see their self-esteem crumbling; I thought that was silly, so I wanted to make math more friendly and accessible. ~ Danica McKellar

Angel you may have lucked out this time, but just remember I'm going to be on your ass until I get my revenge. I promise you this will not be the last time you will see me! You're a dead man Medina, maybe not now but soon! - Orlando to Angel under the crumbling furnace in the hotel. ~ Angel Ramon Medina

Standing there in-between two disgusting Dumpsters in some crappy alley
with the whole world crumbling down around me, and hearing Alex say those
words, all the fear I have carried with me since I learned to sit, stand, breathe
since I was told that at the very heart of me was something wrong, something
rotten and diseased, something to be suppressed - since I was told that I was
always just a heartbeat away from being damaged - all of it vanishes at once.
That thing - the heart of hearts of me, the core of my core - stretches and unfurls
even further, soaring like a flag: making me feel stronger than I ever have before. ~ Lauren Oliver

And the air was rent with cries of the living glaring at the rotted bones and rags of their kin and friends just a-swingin in the winds circling about the land, and pulling the bones and rags--some crumbling and dry, some still squirming with the worms eating away at them--from those once mighty roots, and putting them back in the gaping holes. ~ Sarah E. Wright

How do you sustain yourself when all the old structures people looked to for support - religion, family, ethnic solidarity - are crumbling, or feel so false that you refuse to avail yourself of them? What comes next? ~ Adam Mansbach

A broken transportation system hits Michiganders in the pocketbook. Every year, our friends and neighbors spend millions of dollars on car repairs after driving on crumbling streets. ~ Kerry Bentivolio

An amazing find happens after using multispectral imaging in a crumbling literary treasure blackened by fire ~ Unknown

Traditional progressive bread and butter economic issues are the heart of the solution. It's about ensuring decent jobs with a good wage. It's about ensuring a free public education in all the communities of America, whether they are in the shiny new affluent suburbs or the crumbling old schools of the older suburbs and cities. It's about ensuring a system where all Americans have access to health care, instead of a steadily declining share of our population. ~ Paul Wellstone

It struck me that we-that moth and I-were two opposite extremes. My existence was as unstable as a stream, changing in every
way; but the moth was like a piece of stone, changing not at all. While thinking this thought, I reached out a finger to feel the moth's velvety surface; but when I brushed it with my fingertip, it turned all at once into a pile of ash without even a sound, without even a moment in which I could see it crumbling. I was so astonished I let out a cry. The swirling in my mind stopped; I felt as if I had stepped into the eye of a storm. I let the tiny shroud and its pile of ashes flutter to the ground; and now I understood the thing that had puzzled me all morning. The stale air had washed away. The past was gone. ~ Arthur Golden

I could never be a country person, sitting around trees trying to write a song. I would rather be in the middle of society, whether it's growing or crumbling. ~ Ric Ocasek

It sloweth age, it strengtheneth youth, it helpeth digestion, it abandoneth melancholie, it relisheth the heart, it lighteneth the mind, it quickenth the spirits, it keepeth and preserveth the head from whirling, the eyes from dazzling, the tongue from lisping, the mouth from snaffling, the teeth from chattering and the throat from rattling; it keepeth the stomach from wambling, the heart from swelling, the hands from shivering, the sinews from shrinking, the veins from crumbling, the bones from aching, and the marrow from soaking. ~ Joseph Lyons

I've learned of life this bitter truth
Hope not between the crumbling walls Of mankind's gratitude to find repose,
But rather,
Build within thy own soul
Fortresses! ~ Georgia Douglas Johnson

I don't want to see the dollar strong because the rest of the world is crumbling. I would like to see the dollar strong because the Fed has said it wants it to be strong in the future. ~ David Malpass

Her face was plastered with layers of powder and looked like a face of stone. And with her noble profile, she seemed, on the triangular, moss-covered pedestal hidden by her cape, like a crumbling goddess in a park. ~ Marcel Proust

What do we inherit, and how, and why? The relatively new field of epigenetics studies the impact of environment and experience on genes themselves. How much had the gene pool of the Waldens - that apparently cheerful extended family I had seen singing on YouTube - formed me? I did not come from the line of small, wiry, dark-eyed people of the shtetl, the men swaying over crumbling tombstones, prayer books in their hands. The imprint of pogroms, of the difficulties and sorrows of immigrant life was not mine - at least not in the physical sense. But I had carried these things a long way in my heart. I was of that dusty and doomed Polish village - and I was not. What had I inherited psychologically? What was in my blood? I was made of three people: my mother, my father, Ben Walden. Disparate worlds had been floating and colliding within me all my life. ~ Dani Shapiro

it feels like a precious wound, like a heartbreak you won't let go of because it hurts too good. We all want things to stay the same, David; settle for living in misery because we're afraid of change, of things crumbling to ruins. Then I looked around in this place [the augusteum], at the chaos its endured – the way it has been adapted, burned, pillaged and found a way to build itself back up again. And I was reassured that maybe my life hasn't been so chaotic; tt's just the world that is and the only real trap is getting attached to any of it. Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation… We must always be prepared for endless waves of transformation. Both of us deserve better than staying together because we're afraid we'll be destroyed if we don't. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy ... It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

I stayed against the back wall, as far away as I could get. Not just to stay away from the Plague Lady but to be farther away from the weird old dolls that lined the shelves of her office. Real-looking hair sprouted from their crumbling heads and all their faces were painted with smiles. Kids in the old days must have loved nightmares or something. ~ Scott Westerfeld

Huge knots of sea-weed hung upon the jagged and pointed stones, trembling in every breath of wind; and the green ivy clung mournfully round the dark and ruined battlements. Behind it rose the ancient castle, its towers roofless, and its massive walls crumbling away, but telling us proudly of its own might and strength, as when, seven hundred years ago, it rang with the clash of arms, or resounded with the noise of feasting and revelry. ~ Charles Dickens

I'd argue, in fact, that the rise of the so-called Islamic State under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi does somewhat vindicate Osama bin Laden's strategy and his belief that making the West intervention-weary through war would lead to a power vacuum in the Middle East and that the West would abandon its support for Arab despots, which would lead to the crumbling of despotic regimes. From the ashes of that would rise an Islamic State. Bin Laden said this eleven years ago, and it's uncanny how the Arab uprisings have turned out. ~ Maajid Nawaz

Hypatia's case then was this. She lived in a time when her intellectual heritage, a seven-hundred-year-old tradition, was crumbling. The supports that had once seemed so secure - the Museum and the libraries - had all been swept away by the swell of ignorant dogmatism. Almost alone, virtually the last academic, she stood for the intellectual values, for rigorous mathematics, ascetic Neoplatonism, the crucial role of the mind, and the voice of temperance and moderation in civic life. ~ Michael A.B. Deakin

Your past is your foundation, and if it's crumbling then you've got nothing left to build on. ~ C.M. Stunich

She could hear her hair growing. It sounded like something crumbling. A burnt thing crumbling. Coal. Toast. Moths crisped on a light bulb. She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, travelling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died. Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them. ~ Arundhati Roy

... So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And Music shall untune the sky ~ John Dryden

Linger now with me, thou Beauty,
On the sharp archaic shore.
Surely 'tis a wastrel's duty
And the gods could ask no more.
If thou lingerest when I linger,
If thou tread'st the stones I tread,
Thou wilt stay my spirit's hunger
And dispel the dreams I dread.

Come thou, love, my own, my only,
Through the battlements of Groan;
Lingering becomes so lonely
When one lingers on one's own.

I have lingered in the cloisters
Of the Northern Wing at night,
As the sky unclasped its oysters
On the midnight pearls of light;
For the long remorseless shadows
Chilled me with exquisite fear.
I have lingered in cold meadows
Through a month of rain, my dear.

Come, my Love, my sweet, my Only,
Through the parapets of Groan.
Lingering can be very lonely
When one lingers on one's own.

In dark alcoves I have lingered
Conscious of dead dynasties;
I have lingered in blue cellars
And in hollow trunks of trees.
Many a traveler through moonlight
Passing by a winding stair
Or a cold and crumbling archway
Has been shocked to see me there.

I have longed for thee, my Only,
Hark! the footsteps of the Groan!
Lingering is so very lonely
When one lingers all alone.

Will thou come with me, and linger?
And discourse with me of those
Secret things the mystic ~ Mervyn Peake

We have great cities to visit: New York and Washington, Paris and London; and further east, and older than any of these, the legendary city of Samarkand, whose crumbling palaces and mosques still welcome travelers on the Silk road. Weary of cities? Then we'll take to the wilds. To the islands of Hawaii and the mountains of Japan, to forests where Civil War dead still lie, and stretches of sea no mariner ever crossed. They all have their poetry: the glittering cities and the ruined, the watery wastes and the dusty; I want to show you them all. I want to show you everything. ~ Clive Barker

There is a red sandy beach in the Minas Basin in Nova Scotia that is unlike any other shore landscape I have ever seen. The world's highest tides wash its shores, and the soft cliffs of Blomidon Provincial Park are constantly crumbling away; whole trees will occasionally slide down to the sea to decay slowly in the wind and brine. ~ John Burnside

They spent the day with Lucia, who promised that the following day she would take them up to Scala, an even tinier, loftier town where her parents now lived. That evening, Mac took her to a restaurant called Il Flauto di Pan- Pan's Flute- perched at the Villa Cimbrone among the gardens and crumbling walls. It was probably the most beautiful restaurant she'd ever seen. The centuries-old villa was embellished with incredible gardens of fuchsia bougainvillea, lemon and cypress trees and flowering herbs that scented the air. Their veranda table had an impossibly gorgeous view of the sea. ~ Susan Wiggs

The millions of vacationers who came here every year before Katrina were mostly unaware of this poverty. French Quarter tourists were rarely exposed to the reality beneath the Disneyland Gomorrah that is projected as 'N'Awlins,' a phrasing I have never heard a local use and a place, as far as I can tell, that I have never encountered despite my years in the city. The seemingly average, white, middle-class Americans whooped it up on Bourbon Street without any thought of the third-world lives of so many of the city's citizens that existed under their noses. The husband and wife, clad in khaki shorts, feather boa, and Mardi Gras beads well out of season, beheld a child tap-dancing on the street for money and clapped along to his beat without considering the obvious fact that this was an early school-day afternoon and that the child should be learning to read, not dancing for money. Somehow they did not see their own child beneath the dancer's black visage. Nor, perhaps, did they see the crumbling buildings where the city's poor live as they traveled by cab from the French Quarter to Commander's Palace. They were on vacation and this was not their problem. ~ Billy Sothern

A city finds its life through the humans who inhabit it. When they go, what is truly left? Just silent stones, witnesses to the history but mute in its telling, remaining thus while slowly turning to rubble. It saddens me that life's moments are thus lost, that one cannot experience the past in the same rich vibrancy as the present. You live the moments and then relegate them to memory, now just two-dimensional shadows, pictures without depth, stripped of their purest emotion, their tactile connections no longer accessible. You try to recall, but can bring back only a fraction of the event lived. The rest is gone, never to be as full and complete as it was in that one place at that one time. That was what I thought as I studied these stone remains; that all the tangible things experienced here abide somewhere in time, but can never again be wholly re-animated, now just ghosts imbedded in the crumbling walls and in the fading memories of those who once lived here. ~ Michael Puttonen

In our five thousand years of civilization, our history has often been the handmaid of geography. We lie exactly midway between the North Pole and the Equator. We are the gateway between the Fertile Crescent and Europe, between landlocked Central Asia and the Mediterranean world and beyond that, the Atlantic. Peoples and empires have ebbed and flowed across this land. Even today sixty per cent of Europe's gas supply either passes down the Bosphorus or runs under our very feet through pipelines. We have always been the navel of the world. Yet our favoured location by its very nature surrounded us with historical enemies; to the north, Russia to the south, the Arabs; to the east, Persia and to the west, the Red Apple itself, Europe.'
The Red Apple, the myth of Ottoman imperialism. When Mehmet the Conqueror looked out from the parapets of his fortress of Europe at Constantinople, the Red Apple had been the golden globe in the open palm of Justinian's statue in the Hippodrome, the symbol of Roman power and ambition. Mehmet rode through the crumbling Hippodrome, the decaying streets of dying Byzantium and the Red Apple became Rome itself. The truth of the Red Apple was that it would always be unattainable, for it was the westering spirit, the globe of the setting sun itself.
'Now we find ourselves caught between Arab oil, Russian gas and Iranian radiation and we found that the only way we could take the Red Apple was by joining it.'
This is poor stuff, Georgios thin ~ Ian McDonald

No matter where I look, my walls are crumbling, and this damned girl keeps presenting me with the most dangerous element of all.
Hope. ~ Lauren Layne

My dogs, the only creatures on the planet marked by my singular nurturing imprint, have all turned out to be rude and self-absorbed. In all likelihood, if they were children instead of dogs, I would have foisted more Charlie Sheens or Kardashians onto our crumbling culture. ~ Merrill Markoe

Concrete can rot. It turns green and black before crumbling away.
Maybe only people from Congo know that. ~ Eliot Schrefer

Woolf thought hard and continuously about the gravity, the scale, and the impact of these changes, and about the need for new literary forms to confront and interpret them. She was in the vanguard of a new generation of novelists for whom the traditional conventions of the novel no longer served to represent modern realities: the crumbling of established social and political orders, the sexual disquiet and jagged nerves, the moral revolt and cultural revolutions, the agitation for rights long denied, freedom unreasonably curbed or stupidly repressed. ~ Virginia Woolf

A sensation which had long been familiar to me was this, that I was slowly decomposing while I yet lived. My heart had always been at odds not only with my body but with my mind, and there was absolutely no compatibility between them. I had always been in a state of decomposition and gradual disintegration. At times I conceived thoughts which I myself felt to be inconceivable. At other times I experienced a feeling of pity for which my reason reproved me. Frequently when talking or engaged in business with someone I would begin to argue on this or that subject while all my feelings were somewhere else and I was thinking of something quite different and at the same time reproaching myself. I was a crumbling, decomposing mass. It seemed to me that this was what I had always been and always would be, a strange compound of incompatible elements… ~ Sadegh Hedayat

The idea of mind separate from body goes far back in time. The most famous expression of this is the idea of the Platonic image discussed in the Socratic Dialogues (circa 350 BC). Socrates and Plato expressed the opinion that the real world was but a shadow of reality, and that reality existed on a higher, purer plane reachable only through and preserved in the mind. The mind was considered immortal and survived the crumbling corpus in which it dwelt. But only enlightened minds, such as theirs, could see true reality. As such, they believed people like themselves ought to be elevated to the position of philosopher kings and rule the world with purity of vision. (A similarly wacky idea was expressed by the fictional air force General Jack D. Ripper in Kubrick's classic dark satire Dr. Strangelove. General Ripper postulated that purity of essence was the most important thing in life.) ~ James Luce

He walked me to the door--the same one to which I'd been escorted many times before by pimply high school boys and a few miscellaneous suitors along the way. But this time was different. Bigger. I felt it. I wondered for a moment if he felt it, too.
That's when the spike heel of my boot caught itself on a small patch of crumbling mortar on my parents' redbrick sidewalk. In an instant, I saw my life and any ounce of pride remaining in my soul pass before my eyes as my body lurched forward. I was going to bite it for sure--and right in front of the Marlboro Man. I was an idiot, I told myself, a dork, a klutz of the highest order. I wanted desperately to snap my fingers and magically wind up in Chicago, where I belonged, but my hands were too busy darting in front of my torso, hoping to brace my body from the fall.
But someone caught me. Was it an angel? In a way. It was Marlboro Man, whose tough upbringing on a working cattle ranch had produced the quick reflexes necessary to save me, his uncoordinated date, from certain wipeout. Once the danger was over, I laughed from nervous embarrassment. Marlboro Man chuckled gently. He was still holding my arms, in the same strong cowboy grip he'd used to rescue me moments earlier. Where were my knees? They were no longer part of my anatomy.
I looked at Marlboro Man. He wasn't chuckling anymore. He was standing right in front of me…and he was still holding my arms. ~ Ree Drummond

My seams gape wide so I'm tossed aside
To rot on a lonely shore,
While the leaves and mould like a shroud unfold,
For the last of my trails are o'er,
But I float in dreams on Northland streams
That never again I'll see,
As I lie on the marge of the old portage
With grief for company.

When the sunset gilds the timbered hills
That guard Timagami,
And the moon beams play on far James Bay
By the brink of the frozen sea,
In phantom guise my spirit flies
As the dream blades dip and swing
Where the waters flow from the Long Ago
In the spell of the beck'ning spring.

Do the cow-moose call on the Montreal
When the first frost bites the air,
And the mists unfold from the red and gold
That the autumn ridges wear?
When the white falls roar as they did of yore
On the Lady Evelyn,
Do the square-tail leap from the black pool deep
Where the pictured rocks begin?

Oh! the fur fleet sings on Temiscaming
As the ashen paddles bend,
And the crews carouse at Rupert's House
At the sullen winter's end;
But my days are done where the lean wolves run,
And I ripple no more the path,
Where the grey geese race 'cross the red moon's face
From the white winds Arctic wrath.

Tho' the death-fraught way from the Saguenay
To the storied Nipigon,
Once knew me well, now a crumbling shell
I watch as the y ~ George Marsh

Don't do this," he begged hoarsely against her temple, crumbling inside. Honor wasn't the type to make empty threats or do something like this on a whim. No, she meant it and was prepared to go through with it. He had one last shot to change her mind, right now, before he lost her forever. So no, even he wasn't above begging if that's what it took to make her stay and work this out. "You said you still love me," he whispered brokenly. He was holding onto that for all it was worth. It had to be enough. He squeezed her tighter. "I know you're scared and I know you're hurting but… Don't do this. Don't walk away. Please." Don't leave me. She'd never know how much it cost him to beg her this way, but he was so damn scared right now he didn't care how pathetic it made him look. He'd do or say f-ing whatever it took to get her to listen to reason, make her change her mind. Anything except agreeing to live a lie and hide his true feelings for her from the rest of the world, no matter what the reason. A sob tore out of her. Honor stopped shoving at him. She wound her arms around his back and squeezed so hard he felt the muscles in her arms tremble. Liam closed his eyes and pressed his face against her hair, that painful bubble of hope surfacing again. He could feel her torment, her pain. If he could just calm her down long enough to get her to listen, really listen and then think this through… "Sweet pea, just listen to me," he began softly.
"No, I can't." Honor tore away from h ~ Kaylea Cross

and he stopped going to church entirely, because there seemed no point now in even contemplating prayer for his soul. Besides, the parish church near Kilmartin dated to 1432, and the crumbling stones certainly couldn‟t takea direct strike of lightning.
And if God ever wanted to smite a sinner, he couldn‟t do better than Michael Stirling.
Michael Stirling, Sinner.
He could see it on a calling card. He‟d have had it printed up, even - his was just that sort of black sense of humor - if he weren‟t convinced it would kill his mother on the spot.
Rake he might be, but there was no need to torture the woman who‟d borne him. ~ Julia Quinn

nestle up with me now and let us
fall in love with the feeling
of our worries spilling into the sheets.
nestle up with me now,
let us give birth to seeds of whispering moans
and let those coil with our bones
as we tumble in love with the blooming echo.
nestle up with me now,
let us grow old and die delicate in each other's arms
for my god what an exquisite honor it would be
to erode from this crumbling earth
all the while being washed in your
lover's grains,

nestle up with me. ~ Christopher Poindexter

In North Carolina, I stopped to gas up at a Humble Oil station, then walked around the corner to use the toilet. There were two doors and three signs. MEN was neatly stenciled over one door, LADIES over the other. The third sign was an arrow on a stick. It pointed toward the brush-covered slope behind the station. It said COLORED. Curious, I walked down the path, being careful to sidle at a couple of points where the oily, green-shading-to-maroon leaves of poison ivy were unmistakable ... There was no facility. What I found at the end of the path was a narrow stream with a board laid across it on a couple of crumbling concrete posts ... If I ever give you the idea that 1958's all Andy-n-Opie, remember the path, okay? The one lined with poison ivy. And the board over the stream. ~ Stephen King

After picking up the lamp, she went to Joyce, who was clutching her injured shoulder. I should leave you here, she thought. She was unaware she had said the words aloud until Joyce replied.
"You can't let me die!"
"You're not going to die." Disgusted, terrified, Sara removed her own petticoat, wadded it up, and pressed it firmly against the wound to staunch the blood. Joyce screamed like an enraged cat, her eyes slitted and demonic. Sara's ears rang from the piercing cry.
"Be quiet, you bitch!" Sara snapped. "Not another sound!" Suddenly her entire body was filled with furious energy. She felt strong enough to push down a stone wall with her bare hands. She went to the crumbling entrance of the castle and saw that the hack driver was still waiting, craning his neck curiously. "You!" she shouted. "Come here right away, or you won't get a bloody shilling of what she promised!" She turned back to Joyce, her blue eyes blazing. "And you... give me back my necklace. ~ Lisa Kleypas

For her, from the Tiber down, there, there beyond the crumbling castles, and after the blond vineyards, there was, on the hills and mountains, and in the brief plains of Italy, a kind of great fertile womb, two swollen Eustachian tubes, streaked with an abundance of granules, the granular and greasy, the happy caviar of the race. From time to time, from the great Ovary ripened follicles opened, like pomegranate seeds: and red grains, mad with amorous certitude, descended upon the city, to encounter the male afflatus, the vitalizing impulse, that spermatic aura of which the ovarists of the eighteenth century wrote their fantastic treatise. ~ Carlo Emilio Gadda

Ray Bradbury's entire oeuvre exemplifies the crumbling of SCIENCE FICTION into the open interplay of science fiction, fantasy and horror. ~ Hal Duncan

I understood something then. My sister might be twice the goddess I was, but I was twice the witch. Her crumbling trash could not help me. ~ Madeline Miller

High-speed trains in Japan can now reach 375 mph - twice as fast as any public transit train in the United States. America's railroads were once the envy of the world. Today they are in disrepair and we are falling further and further behind the rest of the world. We need to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, including rail. When we do that we not only make our country more productive and efficient, we create millions of new jobs. ~ Bernie Sanders

Is it really in our countrys best interest to signal to the enemy that they probably only have to wait us out a little longer because congressional determination to defeat them is crumbling? Doesnt such a resolution further diminish our chances for success at the very time our soldiers are preparing to go into battle? And finally, regardless of our politics is this the time to announce to the world that our president is 'on his own'? ~ Fred Thompson

I was in Nashville, Tennessee, and I saw - we talk about crumbling bridges - I saw one, concrete literally falling onto the underpass below, threatening auto traffic. ~ Anthony Foxx

To the eye it is fair enough, here; but seen in its integrity, under the sky, and by the daylight, it is a crumbling tower of waste, mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness, and suffering. ~ Charles Dickens

I come from a generation that suffered school lessons in portacabins and crumbling hospitals. I tell you one thing, for the eighteen years they were in power the Tories did nothing to fix the roof when the sun was shining. ~ Ed Miliband

He's a jerk."

"No Luminista. He's a young man who loves you but doesn't know how to treat you right yet. You have to show him how. Show him that you can take what he dishes out without crumbling. That you're beautiful and strong, and he should lift you up, not tear you down. ~ Ednah Walters

Feet scraped inside-out next to unblemished boots. Black-and-gold Kel uniforms braided into cracked rib cages. Gape-jawed, twisted skulls with eye sockets staring out their sides and strands of tendon knotted through crumbling teeth. A book of profanities written in every futile shade of red the human body had ever devised, its pages upended over the battlefield from horizon to horizon. ~ Yoon Ha Lee

The fact is that the buildings here were not made to speak to the world as we know it, but to the citizens of the USSR. Visible from afar and unfailingly spectacular, they are effectively monuments, ideological markers endowed with an almost mystical aura by their positioning in space and expressive power. "By its incongruity, by its inhuman stature" writes the philosopher Jacques Derrida, "the monumental dimension serves to emphasize the non-representable nature of the very concept that it evokes." This concept, whether in Grodno, Kiev or Dushanbe, is might. The might of power. A power that would soon become illusory and whose crumbling is indeed manifested by the growing stylistic diversity of this architecture. ~ Frederic Chaubin

Rosehill was shady and beautiful, the most serene place I could imagine. It had been closed to the public for years, and sometimes as I wandered alone - and often lonely - through the lush fern beds and long curtains of silvery moss, I pretended the crumbling angels were wood nymphs and fairies and I their ruler, queen of my own graveyard kingdom. ~ Amanda Stevens

For the developing world, the past half-century has been a time of recurring hope and frequent disappointment. Great waves of change have washed over the landscape, from the crumbling of colonial hegemonies in mid-century to the recent collapse of Communist empires. But too often, what rushed in to replace the old order were empty hopes-not only in the false allure of state socialism, non-alignment and single-party rule, but also the false glories of romantic nationalism and narrow tribalism, and the false dawn of runaway individualism. ~ His Highness The Aga Khan