Decaying Quotes

Amid these fading and decaying things, be the glass that rings out as it's breaking. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Uselessness
Let mine not be the saddest fate of all,
To live beyond my greater self; to see
My faculties decaying, as the tree
Stands stark and helpless while its green leaves fall
Let me hear rather the imperious call,
Which all men dread, in my glad morning time,
And follow death ere I have reached my prime,
Or drunk the strengthening cordial of life's gall.
The lightning's stroke or the fierce tempest blast
Which fells the green tree to the earth to-day
Is kinder than the calm that lets it last,
Unhappy witness of its own decay.
May no man ever look on me and say,
'She lives, but all her usefulness is past. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying, organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

A not 100-percent-perfect-looking-in-every-way female? You might as well film a dead squid decaying on a beach somewhere for two hours. ~ Mindy Kaling

Cockroaches are survivors. Turn on the lights and you will see a scattering of casino hosts in three thousand dollar bespoken suits, corporate fruit flies in empty suits, lawyer-class slime on their way to the courthouse to go shopping for other people's money, bankers shilling bad loans by bundling them together with good ones and sending them down the financial pipeline knowing that they stand protected by the political scum from every level of government who have risen to breathtaking heights of mediocrity, tossing a couple of bucks from the public till to the obedient myrmidons in exchange for their votes. While decaying empire crumble, cockroaches multiply among the ruins. - Bonjour Amigos ~ David Gustafson

I am both ever evolving and ever decaying. ~ Stephanie Kuehn

Behold, I bring you the Superman! The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beg of you my brothers, remain true to the earth, and believe not those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I've heard that people spend a really long time finding their soul mates."
I squeeze Lily's shoulder. She's been in her soul mate's arms since she was little.
"It took you two long enough, didn't it?" Lo says. "No thanks to me." He pauses. "But I want you two to know - from the bottom of my black, decaying heart - I love you both, and the only perfect world has Ryke standing beside Daisy and Daisy standing beside Ryke. Anything less is fucked up. Remember that, will you? ~ Krista Ritchie

But to a dog, the stench of a decaying rat probably smells like Chanel No. 5. ~ Stephen King

Who died in the shop and how does it already smell like something has been decaying in the hot sun?"
"Oh, you know us. Brought home some roadkill for kicks."
"You didn't wait for me? You know how much I love roadkill. I mean, roadkill is the gift that keeps on giving. ~ Nichole Chase

My faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. ~ Mark Twain

Mainline American Protestantism, as is often the case, plodded wearily along as if nothing had changed. Like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless, house decaying around her but acting as if her family still controlled the city, our theologians and church leaders continued to think and act as if we were in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid. ~ Stanley Hauerwas

Who am I? Not the body, because it is decaying; not the mind, because the brain will decay with the body; not the personality, nor the emotions, for these also will vanish with death. ~ Ramana Maharshi

Societies who do not care for their young people and old people are decadent, decaying societies. ~ Suzan Shown Harjo

His slender hands curled into fists. "You don't want to change? Do you have any idea what I've been through for you? Why do you think I keep coming back to that horrid, dirty, decaying world of yours? Because you changed me! It makes me sick to think of how I have shifted away from what I should be!"
I leaned back, terrified of the pure fury in his face.
He took a deep breath, closing his eyes and releasing all the tension from his facial muscles, returning them back to the mask of perfection. "But this is irrelevant. When I get back to where I am supposed to be, my connection to eternity will be restored and flawless. I will be restored. And you will be connected, too, and we have forever to - "
"Whoa, whoa, stop right there, psycho. I'm not coming with you."
He got that infuriating smile, that one that all faeries have that says they know more than you ever will and you can't even begin to function on the same plane as them but isn't it cute that you think you have any right to consider yourself a rational creature. It was a condescending head pat in smile form.
"Evelyn," he said, his golden voice trying to pull me in closer. "I love you. ~ Kiersten White

I stopped and filled my lungs, smelling Africa - smelling dust, woodsmoke, a perfume from a flower, something musty, something decaying. ~ William Boyd

He says nothing, vehemently. I falter away and we sit, mutually staring into the fouled water ...
With time to kill, I ponder dismally the possible derivation of the zombie myth from people like my boyfriend. I picture Ralph blackened, semi-fingered, with bright bone peeking through his flesh. The odd small worm clings, festively wiggling. In my image, Ralph's really upset about decaying, and I feel for him sorrowfully. I want to tell him I would still love him, if he were decomposed. Of course in practice there is no predicting what I'd feel, and besides which, it's a wild associative leap.
I ponder dismally how I've alienated people, all my life, with my bizarre associative leaps. ~ Sandra Newman

As surely as the sunset in my latest November
shall translate me to the ethereal world,
and remind me of the ruddy morning of youth;
as surely as the last strain of music which falls on my decaying ear
shall make age to be forgotten,
or, in short, the manifold influences of nature
survive during the term of our natural life,
so surely my Friend shall forever be my Friend,
and reflect a ray of God to me,
and time shall foster and adorn and consecrate our Friendship,
no less than the ruins of temples. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Despite our accumulation of material wealth, humanity is now engulfed by a widespread economic collapse. Many areas of production exhibit regressive trends so that visible epicentres of decay are growing on all sides and threatening humanity itself. Despite all the research no means can be found to prevent humanity from decaying alive. This is no more than the just and legitimate consequence of human activity. Knowing nothing of Nature's omnipotent laws, and with mindless greed, humanity claws into the life-giving organism of Mother Earth. She is now, with elemental power, beginning to paralyse the wanton hand that dared disturb the forces that serve all Creation. ~ Viktor Schauberger

Before capitalism will go to hell, then, it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way. ~ Wolfgang Streeck

all photographs are about death, really, and time: about preserving a moment in silver and chemicals, when life itself is never preserved, when every cell of everything is already decaying, and being replaced, and decaying again. The subject and the image coexist for the moment that the shutter opens and closes. And then the subject decays but the image lives on unchanged. ~ Emma Darwin

The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without. ~ T. S. Eliot

I know Teddy Kennedy had fun at the Democratic convention when he said that I said that trees and vegetation caused 80 percent of the air pollution in this country ... Well, now he was a little wrong about what I said. I didn't say 80 percent. I said 92 percent-93 percent, pardon me. And I didn't say air pollution, I said oxides of nitrogen. Growing and decaying vegetation in this land are responsible for 93 percent of the oxides of nitrogen ... If we are totally successful and can eliminate all the manmade oxides of nitrogen, we'll still have 93 percent as much as we have in the air today. ~ Ronald Reagan

It's quiet in the suburbs. It's too cold for people to be in their gardens; and it's not a thoroughfare so few cars drive by. I look past decaying roses and through the first flush of Michelmas daisies, blazing a glorious purple, into the darkened windows of the houses we walk by. Who lives here? Are they watching us? Did one of our neighbours do something seven years ago that he now regrets? How little we know of the people who surround us. ~ Sanjida Kay

All places where the French settled have corruption at their heart, a kind of soft, rotten glow, like the phosphorescence of decaying wood, that is oddly attractive. ~ Anne Rivers Siddons

As everyone who has read the Marxists critically has not failed to see ... the gospel of St. Marx is just the old Judaeo-Christian mythology with the supernatural sanctions left out, thus making the cult the most implausible and unreasonable of all the Christian heresies. It is true that there is reciprocal hostility between Marxists and the other Christian cults, but that is merely normal. Christian sects began persecuting each other even before one of them attained political power in the decaying Roman Empire, and everyone remembers the fearful Wars of Religion that convulsed and almost ruined Europe. The Gospel of Love invariably incites the most savage and blood-thirsty hatreds. ~ Revilo P. Oliver

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

Darkness can be funny. It can be quirky. There are different ways that that stuff comes out as a creative person. But the actual conflicted, twisted, decaying, rotting soul? That's not me. No more. ~ Nikki Sixx

The day you stop learning is the day you begin decaying. ~ Isaac Asimov

Gentle reader, the Fountain of Youth is radioactive, and those who imbibe its poisonous heavy waters will suffer the hideous fate of decaying metal. Yet almost without exception, the wretched idiot inhabitants of our benighted planet would gulp down this radioactive excrement if it were offered. ~ William S. Burroughs

I'm a historian by training and by conviction. And so the thing that has throughout informed my thinking about international relations is history. I think, for example, the reason that I was perhaps able to see sooner than some others that the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe was decaying
if not disintegrating
was that I came to it through history and through Germany, rather than through Sovietology and through Moscow. And therefore the starting point was that no empire in history has lasted forever, and this one won't either. ~ Timothy Garton Ash

We lived in the Portland Avenue Stacks, a sprawling hive of discolored tin shoeboxes rusting on the shores of I-40, just west of Oklahoma City's decaying skyscraper core. ~ Ernest Cline

I am an anarch in space, a metahistorian in time. Hence I am committed to neither the political present nor tradition; I am blank and also open and potent in any direction.
Dear old Dad, in contrast, still pours his wine into the same decaying old wineskins, he still believes in a constitution when nothing and no one constitutes anything. ~ Ernst Junger

The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified. ~ H.G.Wells

He sensed a lonely childhood on some great decaying plantation, an echoing 'Great House' slowly falling into disrepair and being encroached on by the luxuriance of the tropics. The parents dying, and the property being sold. The companionship of a servant or two and an equivocal life in lodgings in the capital. The beauty which was her only asset and the struggle against the shady propositions to be a 'governess', a 'companion', a 'secretary', all of which meant respectable prostitution. Then the dubious, unknown steps into the world of entertainment. The evening stint at the nightclub with the mysterious act which, among people dominated by magic, must have kept many away from her and made her a person to be feared. And then, one evening, the huge man with the grey face sitting at a table by himself. The promise that he would put her on Broadway. The chance of a new life, of an escape from the heat and the dirt and the solitude.

Bond turned brusquely away from the window. A romantic picture, perhaps. But it must have been something like that. ~ Ian Fleming

What's on the outside to prevent their return? They are now convicted felons, a branding they will never be able to shake. The odds were stacked against them to begin with, and now that they're tagged as felons, life in the free world is somehow supposed to improve? These are the real casualties of our wars. The war on drugs. The war on crime. Unintended victims of tough laws passed by tough politicians over the past forty years. One million young black men now warehoused in decaying prisons, idling away the days at taxpayer expense. Our prisons are packed. Our streets are filled with drugs. Who's winning the war? ~ John Grisham

Real life is just another stage.
Just another stage where I have to look and act
Like I have everything put together;
everything neat, perfect, and in order,
when in reality I'm slowly dying,
Slowly decaying, screaming and clawing,
at this little box I've been put into,
Trying desperately to escape. ~ Justin Wetch

For the purposes of science, information had to mean something special. Three centuries earlier, the new discipline of physics could not proceed until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague - force, mass, motion, and even time - and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms into quantities, suitable for use in mathematical formulas. Until then, motion (for example) had been just as soft and inclusive a term as information. For Aristotelians, motion covered a far-flung family of phenomena: a peach ripening, a stone falling, a child growing, a body decaying. That was too rich. Most varieties of motion had to be tossed out before Newton's laws could apply and the Scientific Revolution could succeed. In the nineteenth century, energy began to undergo a similar transformation: natural philosophers adapted a word meaning vigor or intensity. They mathematicized it, giving energy its fundamental place in the physicists' view of nature.

It was the same with information. A rite of purification became necessary.

And then, when it was made simple, distilled, counted in bits, information was found to be everywhere. ~ James Gleick

Entropy
The Disintegrating Integration of
Cheez-Whiz Squirts Insipid Inspiration
Quoth the Oblong Eclipse of
Nether-Knowledge Never Knowing
Decaying Matter in a Decaying Orbit
Orangutans of Science
Study Ignorance of What
The Cows Already Know. ~ Ubiquitous Bubba

His shelf. Good. Noodle dust. Decaying brain collecting dust. Must insert it back in skull - what was I thinking? ~ Jarod Kintz

The tomb lies at the end of every path. Only the soul is immortal. Guard this treasure well. Your decaying husk is but a temporary vessel on an endless voyage. ~ William Hjortsberg

Republicans and Democrats are obsessed with making sure that illegal aliens are granted citizenship. The American people are not. They're concerned about jobs, the economy, debt. They're concerned about a plundering country. They're concerned about a decaying, dying country. ~ Rush Limbaugh

Up to the days of Indiana's early statehood, probably as late as 1825, there stood, in what is now the beautiful little city of Vincennes on the Wabash, the decaying remnant of an old and curiously gnarled cherry tree, known as the Roussillion tree, le cerisier de Monsieur Roussillion, as the French inhabitants called it, which as long as it lived bore fruit remarkable for richness of flavor and peculiar dark ruby depth of color. ~ Maurice Thompson

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (whose mother died ten days after she was born) wrote a novel that anticipates Semmelweis's discovery and serves as a parable for the destructive power of decaying matter. ~ Laura Mullen

Do not bless all the changes; change must be progressive; if not, we must not call it as change; the correct name is deterioration or decaying! Beware of the changes! Any change which is not progressive is just a rotting! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently inhabit taverns and have no self control. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

No opinions, no ideas, no real knowledge of anything, no ideals, no inspiration; a fat, slothful, querulous, greedy, impotent carcass; a stump, a decaying belly washed up on the shore ... Always tired, always bored, always hurt, always hating. ~ Cyril Connolly

The house is decaying, the furnishings are museum pieces, half the staff are consumed with loathing of me out of loyalty to my father, or because I remind them of my brother. In any case, they're people who lived in the same house as Hector when there are perfectly good ditches to die in, which tells you as much as you need to know. ~ K.J. Charles

It has always been a mark of decaying civilizations to become obsessed with sex. When people lose their way, their purpose, their will, and their goals, as well as their faith ... they go "a whoring." It is a form of diversion that requires no thought, no character, and no restraint. ~ Billy Graham

Reading private correspondence is in poor taste, Lord Ackerly."
"Unless it is terribly interesting," Eleanor says, "which Jessamin's letters are not. Mine, however, are lurid tales of my near-death experience and subsequent sequestering against my will in the home of the mysterious and brooding Lord Ackerly. I fear I may have given you a tragic past and a deadly secret or two."
"Are we staying in a decaying Gothic abbey?" I ask.
"Naturally. When I'm finished, there won't be a person in all the city who isn't writhing with jealousy over the heart-pounding drama of my life." She pauses, tapping her pen thoughtfully against her chin. "I don't suppose you have a cousin? I could very much use a romantic foil."
Finn shakes his head. "Sorry to disappoint."
"Alas. As long as I'm not the friend who meets a tragic end that brings you two together forever through shared grief." Her line meets dead silence, and a sly grin splits her face. "Oh wait, I nearly was. ~ Kiersten White

Some people will tell you that Toronto, in the summer, is the nothing more than a cesspool of pollution, garbage, and the smells of a hundred ethnicities competing for top spot in a race won historically by curry, garlic, and the occasional cauldron of boiled cabbage. Take a walk down College Street West, Gerrard Street East, or the Danforth, and you'll see; then, they add - these people, complaining - that the stench is so pervasive, so incorrigible, nor merely for lack of wind, but for the ninety-nine percent humidity, which, after a rainstorm, adds an eradicable bottom-note of sweaty Birkenstocks and the organic tang of decaying plant life. This much is true; there is, however, more to the story. Take a walk down the same streets and you'll find racks of the most stunning saris - red with navy brocade, silver, canary, vermillion and chocolate; marts with lahsun and adrak, pyaz and pudina; windows of gelato, zeppole, tiramisu; dusty smoke shops with patio-bistros; you'll find dove-white statuary of Olympian goddesses, mobs in blue jerseys, primed for the World Cup - and more, still, the compulsory banter of couples who even after forty years can turn foul words into the bawdiest, more unforgettable laughter (and those are just the details). Beyond them is the container, the big canvas brushed with parks and valleys and the interminable shore; a backdrop of ferries and islands, gulls and clouds - sparkles of a million wave-tips as the sun decides which colours to leave on it ~ Cory Ingram

To keep from decaying, to be a winner, the athlete must accept pain - not only accept it, but look for it, live with it, learn not to fear it. ~ George A. Sheehan

I have always known that there were spellbinding evil parts for women. For one thing, I was taken at an early age to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Never mind the Protestant work ethic of the dwarfs. Never mind the tedious housework-is-virtuous motif. Never mind the fact that Snow White is a vampire
anyone who lies in a glass coffin without decaying and then comes to life again must be. The truth is that I was paralysed by the scene in which the evil queen drinks the magic potion and changes her shape. What power, what untold possibilities! ~ Margaret Atwood

Her soul opened slowly and timidly to her kind, but her imagination rushed out to the beauties of the visible world; and the decaying majesty of Allfriars moved her strangely. ~ Edith Wharton

I did not get over the loss of my loved ones; rather, I absorbed the loss into my life, like soil receives decaying matter, until it became a part of who I am. ~ Gerald L. Sittser

Words have power, for better or worse.
Like the smell of fresh rain on cut grass,
Or the stench of a decaying corpse,
Like the soft comfort of a warm blanket on your shoulders,
Or the agony of a dagger splitting your chest in two.
Use them wisely. ~ David Estes

They retained their wooden souls, and the curve of their backs had the enigmatic shape of growth itself and remained a part of the decaying forest ~ Tove Jansson

I remember, around age ten, beholding the scene in The Shining in which the hot young woman whom Jack Nicholson is lewdly embracing in the haunted hotel bathroom ages rapidly in his arms, screeching from nubile chick to putrefying corpse within seconds. I understood that the scene was supposed to represent some kind of primal horror. This was The Shining, after all. But the image of that decaying, cackling crone, her arms outstretched in desire toward the man who is backing away, has stayed with me for three decades, as a type of friend. She's part baths-ghost, part mad-Naomi. She didn't get the memo about being beyond wanting or being wanted. Or perhaps she just means to scare the shit out of him, which she does. ~ Maggie Nelson

You see, this is a problem all over the world. Man is seeking a new response, a new approach to life, because the old ways are decaying, whether in Europe, in Russia, or here. Life is a continual challenge, and merely to try to bring about a better economic order is not a total response to that challenge, which is always new; and when cultures, peoples, civilizations are incapable of responding totally to the challenge of the new, they are destroyed. Unless you are properly educated, unless you have this extraordinary confidence of innocence, you are inevitably going to be absorbed by the collective and lost in mediocrity. You will put some letters after your name, you will be married, have children, and that will be the end of you. You see, ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Carlos, your mysophobia does affect my health. I feel freer – more alive, more vivacious and, ironically enough, healthier – if I'm not constantly made to worry about germs and unhealthy choices. Whether it's for a moment of spontaneous kissing in a phone booth or eating an occasional hamburger…Obsessing about your health doesn't actually make you healthier. The fact of the matter is, Carlos, our bodies are decaying at every moment, regardless of what we do. Living is bad for your health."

"It doesn't have to be."

"Maybe if you live in an antiseptic bubble specially designed by the CDC it doesn't. But in a place like New York City, you're fighting a pointless battle. You can either embrace the dirt and the germs as part of the risky joy of living in an exciting, overpopulated metropolis, or you can spend lots of mental real estate obsessing over whether you touched a few extra microbes when you got on the subway. ~ Zack Love

The American independent cinema is as formulaic as Hollywood and one genre is what you might call the 'inaction movie'. The setting is invariably a decaying town in a regional backwater where a catalytic stranger or returning native meets up with a group of sad, eccentric outsiders. ~ Philip French

Everything will change. The only question is growing up or decaying. ~ Nikki Giovanni

Who would have listened to his tales of woe when his love was the flickering lamp over his own decaying tomb? ~ Faraaz Kazi

A mortal person's mind is like a wilderness, with a tremendous volume of decaying constructs and half-understood experience forming natural harbors for wild animal effects. ~ Piers Anthony

I wanted to explore cancer not just biologically, but metaphorically. The idea that tuberculosis in the 19th century possessed the same kind of frightening and decaying quality was very interesting to me, and it seemed that one could explore the idea that every age defined its own illness. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

I try to give my work everything I've got, because when you're dead or you're out of the business or you're in an old actors' home somewhere, if you've done a good job, your work will still be 16 years old and dancing and healthy and pirouetting and arabesquing all over the place. And they'll say, "That's who he is! He's not this decaying skeleton." ~ Mel Brooks

Duroy, who felt light hearted that evening, said with a smile: "You are gloomy to-day, dear master."
The poet replied: "I am always so, young man, so will you be in a few years. Life is a hill. As long as one is climbing up one looks towards the summit and is happy, but when one reaches the top one suddenly perceives the descent before one, and its bottom, which is death. One climbs up slowly, but one goes down quickly. At your age a man is happy. He hopes for many things, which, by the way, never come to pass. At mine, one no longer expects anything - but death."
Duroy began to laugh: "You make me shudder all over."
Norbert de Varenne went on: "No, you do not understand me now, but later on you will remember what I am saying to you at this moment. A day comes, and it comes early for many, when there is an end to mirth, for behind everything one looks at one sees death. You do not even understand the word. At your age it means nothing; at mine it is terrible. Yes, one understands it all at once, one does not know how or why, and then everything in life changes its aspect. For fifteen years I have felt death assail me as if I bore within me some gnawing beast. I have felt myself decaying little by little, month by month, hour by hour, like a house crumbling to ruin. Death has disfigured me so completely that I do not recognize myself. I have no longer anything about me of myself - of the fresh, strong man I was at thirty. I have seen death whiten my black hair ~ Guy De Maupassant

If what she is saying is true, then the rest of the world is numb, and we who suffer from ailments of the psyche are the ones who are more advanced in nature. We see the decaying of society, the neglect of morals and human decency: the school shootings, the crimes humans commit against one another, the crimes we commit against ourselves; and we react to them in a way that is more intense than everyone else. Yes, I think. Yes, this is the truth. ~ Tarryn Fisher

There was a formula - a sort of list of things to say and do - which I recognised as something black and forbidden; something which I had read of before in furtive paragraphs of mixed abhorrence and fascination penned by those strange ancient delvers into the universe's guarded secrets whose decaying texts I loved to absorb. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

It is the smell of a million mould-blossomed pages, of a thousand decaying bindings, of a universe of dead words. ~ Jess Kidd

It is a characteristic of any decaying civilization that the great masses of the people are unconscious of the tragedy. Humanity in a crisis is generally insensitive to the gravity of the times in which it lives. Men do not want to believe their own times are wicked, partly because it involves too much self-accusation and principally because they have no standards outside of themselves by which to measure their times. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness. ~ Joe Hill

The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself, after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck six times. ~ William Faulkner

My love will come
will fling open her arms and fold me in them,
will understand my fears, observe my changes.
In from the pouring dark, from the pitch night
without stopping to bang the taxi door
she'll run upstairs through the decaying porch
burning with love and love's happiness,
she'll run dripping upstairs, she won't knock,
will take my head in her hands,
and when she drops her overcoat on a chair,
it will slide to the floor in a blue heap. ~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko

This isn't for other people," he explained. "This is for me. I'm terrified at the thought of my body decaying. I don't want to die. I want to live forever. ~ Caitlin Doughty

The darkness amplifies the stench of decaying flesh- Random thought ~ Jerry W. McKinney

Desiree the child bride, and her sister Miranda, had gone grave-robbing for a wedding gown. In the north end of the cemetery, among the palatial mausoleums with their broken windows of stained glass where the ivy crept in, was the resting place of a young woman who'd been murdered at the altar while reciting her marital vows. The decaying tombstone, among the cemetery's most envied, was a limestone bride in despair, shoulders as slumped as a mule's, a bouquet of lilies strewn at her feet. Though her murder, by her groom's jealous mother, had been long in the past, everyone knew that her father had had her buried in her gown of lace and silk. ~ Timothy Schaffert

I walked to Scott, each step heavy, tears hot on my face, my hands hovering uselessly over his rapidly decaying body. I shut my eyes, forcing myself to recall his lopsided grin. Not his vacant eyes. In my mind, I played back his teasing laugh. Not the gurgling, gasping sounds he'd made right before dying. I remembered his warmth in accidental touches and playful jabs, knowing his body was rotting even as I clung to the memory.
"Thank you," I choked out, telling myself that somewhere nearby, he could still hear my voice. "You saved my life. Good-bye, Scott. I'll never forget you, that's my oath to you. Never." I vowed. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick

Miss Parkinson lived alone in a big bay-windowed house of Edwardian brick with a vast garden of decaying fruit trees and untidy hedges of gigantic size. She was great at making elderberry wine and bottling fruit and preserves and lemon curd and drying flowers for winter. She felt, like Halibut, that things were not as they used to be. The synthetic curse of modern times lay thick on everything. There was everywhere a sad drift from Nature. ~ H.E. Bates

If administration actions are not to mock its own rhetoric, the President must now take the lead in mobilizing public opinion behind a new resolve to meet the crisis in our cities. He should now put before Congress a National Emergency Public Works and Reconstruction bill aimed at building housing for homeless victims of the riot-torn ghettos, repairing damaged public facilities, and in the process generating maximum employment opportunities for unskilled and semiskilled workers. Such a bill should be the first step in the imperative reconstruction of all our decaying center cities.

Admittedly, the prospects for passage of such a bill in the present Congress are dismal. Congressmen will cry out that the rioters must not be re-warded, thereby further penalizing the very victims of the riots. This, after all, is a Congress capable of defeating a meager $40 million rat extermination program the same week it votes $10 million for an aquarium in the District of Columbia!

But the vindictive racial meanness that has descended upon this Congress, already dominated by the revived coalition of Republicans and Dixiecrats, must be challenged - not accommodated. The President must go directly to the people, as Harry Truman did in 1948. He must go to them, not with slogans, but with a timetable for tearing down every slum in the country.

There can be no further delay. The daydreamers and utopians are not those of us who have prepared massive Freedom Budg ~ Bayard Rustin

How old the world is! I walk between two eternities ... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, thatvalley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don't want to die! ~ Denis Diderot

Just about every scientist outside the White House believes climate change is real, is serious, and is accelerated by the continue release of carbon dioxide. If the prospect of melting ice caps, rising sea levels, changing weather patterns, more frequent hurricanes, more violent tornadoes, endless dust storms, decaying forests, dying coral reefs, and increase in respiratory illness and insect-borne diseases - if all that doesn't constitute a serious threat, I don't know what does. ~ Barack Obama

Jiu Jitsu has given me something to pursue. We all need something to work towards. For people, as well as every piece of matter in the universe, there is no such thing as maintenance. If you are not growing you are decaying. The insidious nature of modern times is that it is so easy not to pursue anything. Societal norms pressure us into jobs we do not like, and the daily comforts of televisions and computers offer much in the way of distraction. If that isn't enough, there is always the numbing effects of alcohol coupled with attention-grabbing sporting events which conveniently run year round so one is never short of stimulus. ~ Chris Matakas

My New Year's Eve is always 2 July, the night before my birthday. That's the night I make my resolutions. And this year scares the life out of me, because no matter how successful, how good things appear, there is always a deep core of failure within me, although I am trying to deal with it. My biggest fear, this coming year, is that I will be waking up alone.
It makes me wonder how many bodies will be fished out of the Thames, how many decaying corpses will be found in one-room flats.
I'm just being realistic. ~ Tracey Emin

Moss grows where nothing else can grow. It grows on bricks. It grows on tree bark and roofing slate. It grows in the Arctic Circle and in the balmiest tropics; it also grows on the fur of sloths, on the backs of snails, on decaying human bones ... It is a resurrection engine. A single clump of mosses can lie dormant and dry for forty years at a stretch, and then vault back again into life with a mere soaking of water. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Chicago always hit me as such a gloomy place - I just remember all the snow getting dirty as soon as it would fall, all the decaying brown brick buildings around where we lived, all this soot all over the place. ~ Terry Zwigoff

The boarded-up homes, the decaying storefronts, the aging church rolls, kids from unknown families who swaggered down the streets - loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block - all of it whispered painful truths. ~ Barack Obama

To anybody who can hold the Present at its worth without being inappreciative of the Past, it may be forgiven, if to such an one the solitary old hulk at Portsmouth, Nelson's Victory, seems to float there, not alone as the decaying monument of a fame incorruptible, but also as a poetic approach, softened by its picturesqueness, to the Monitors and yet mightier hulls of the European ironclads. ~ Herman Melville

You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

... but now, along this high, rocky road, it was the leaves of cherry trees that predominated. From the bridge on, these lay like fallen red flowers. Some wet leaves, already decaying, had faded to a pink that was the color of the dawn. Why should decay take the color of the dawn? ~ Yukio Mishima

We do not make beams from the hollow, decaying trunk of the fallen oak. We use the upsoaring tree in the full vigor of its sap. ~ Sylvia Pankhurst

The passageway smelled like decaying bodies and lavender. Her nose found it entertaining. The rocky tunnel ate their footsteps. Camin Barice wanted it to steal their voices. Then, she wouldn't have to listen to the aggravating filth spilling from her charges holes. ~ Auden Johnson

Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental. ~ Jane Jacobs

My habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression, fell damp on the embers of my decaying ire. ~ Charlotte Bronte

Dry fingers of decaying branches protruded upward, above what was left of the canopy of green. They rattled like skeletal bones, grasping for a final breath from the last silvery clouds of evening that slowly drifted by. ~ K. Farrell St. Germain

What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them? ~ Socrates

Crossing my arms over my chest, I said, a little too heartily, "So this is the library." There certainly couldn't be any doubt on that score; never had a room so resembled popular preconception. The walls were paneled in rich, dark wood, although the finish had worn off the edges in spots, where books had scraped against the wood in passing one too many times. A whimsical iron staircase curved to the balcony, the steps narrowing into pie-shaped wedges that promised a broken neck to the unwary. I tilted my head back, dizzied by the sheer number of books, row upon row, more than the most devoted bibliophile could hope to consume in a lifetime of reading.

In one corner, a pile of crumbling paperbacks - James Bond, I noticed, squinting sideways, in splashy seventies covers - struck a slightly incongruous note. I spotted a moldering pile of Country Life cheek by jowl with a complete set of Trevelyan's History of England in the original Victorian bindings. The air was rich with the smell of decaying paper and old leather bindings. Downstairs, where I stood with Colin, the shelves made way for four tall windows, two to the east and two to the north, all hung with rich red draperies checked with blue, in the obverse of the red-flecked blue carpet. On the west wall, the bookshelves surrendered pride of place to a massive fireplace, topped with a carved hood to make Ivanhoe proud, and large enough to roast a serf. In short, the library was a Gothic fantasy. ~ Lauren Willig

The family which takes its mauve an cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, lighted buildings, billboards and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground. They pass on into countryside that has been rendered largely invisible by commercial art. (The goods which the latter advertise have an absolute priority in our value system. Such aesthetic considerations as a view of the countryside accordingly come second. On such matters we are consistent.) They picnic on exquisitely packaged food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream and go on to spend the night at a park which is a menace to public health and morals. Just before dozing off on an air mattress, beneath a nylon tent, amid the stench of decaying refuse, they may reflect vaguely on the curious unevenness of their blessings. Is this, indeed, the American genius? ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Secrets. Everyone has them. The light of day and truth reveal some secrets to be nagging obsessions or habits, while other secrets may be as incriminating as a literal decaying skeleton in one's closet. ~ Kenn Bivins

So when or you or I are made A fable, song, or fleeting shade; All love, all liking, all delight Lies drowned with us in endless night. Then while time serves, and we are but decaying; Come, my Corinna, come, let's go a Maying. ~ Robert Herrick