Decay Quotes

“All things that have form eventually decay." -Orochimaru”
― Masashi Kishimoto

“In order to induce the process of decay, water is necessary. I think that, in the case of women, men are the water.”
― Natsuo Kirino, Grotesque

“By assembling in our mind all the consequential facts we have lived through and by reviewing, appraising or sometimes idealizing the numerous key points of the past, authenticity may gradually mutate and actuality decay at last. At that point in time we are to experience a maimed factuality. ("Labyrinth of the mind")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay; the worst is death and death will have his day.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard II

“Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best -- making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred -- secret hatred: there is disgust -- unspoken disgust: there is treachery -- family treachery: there is vice -- deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: infants are nursed on deception from their very birth: they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies ... All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

“In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.”
― Ernst Fischer

“There's an old adage," he said, "translated from the ancient Coptic, that contains all the wisdom of the ages -- "Life is life and fun is fun, but it's all so quiet when the goldfish die.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“Decline is also a form of voluptuousness, just like growth. Autumn is just as sensual as springtime. There is as much greatness in dying as in procreation.”
― Iwan Goll

“You that in far-off countries of the sky can dwell secure, look back upon me here; for I am weary of this frail world's decay.”
― Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

“I felt a strange delight in causing my decay.”
― Robert Browning, Pauline: A Fragment of a confession

“I love autumn", Emily said to me. "It wins you over with its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.”
― Nicholas Sparks, Two By Two

“I sat wondering: Why is there always this deep shade of melancholy over the fields arid river banks, the sky and the sunshine of our country? And I came to the conclusion that it is because with us Nature is obviously the more important thing. The sky is free, the fields limitless; and the sun merges them into one blazing whole. In the midst of this, man seems so trivial. He comes and goes, like the ferry-boat, from this shore to the other; the babbling hum of his talk, the fitful echo of his song, is heard; the slight movement of his pursuit of his own petty desires is seen in the world's market-places: but how feeble, how temporary, how tragically meaningless it all seems amidst the immense aloofness of the Universe!



The contrast between the beautiful, broad, unalloyed peace of Nature—calm, passive, silent, unfathomable,—and our own everyday worries—paltry, sorrow-laden, strife-tormented, puts me beside myself as I keep staring at the hazy, distant, blue line of trees which fringe the fields across the river.



Where Nature is ever hidden, and cowers under mist and cloud, snow and darkness, there man feels himself master; he regards his desires, his works, as permanent; he wants to perpetuate them, he looks towards posterity, he raises monuments, he writes biographies; he even goes the length of erecting tombstones over the dead. So busy is he that he has not time to consider how many monuments crumble, how often names are forgotten!”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“Lice consume grass, rust consumes iron, and lying the soul!”
― Anton Chekhov, My Life

“At the Moor

Wanderer in the black wind; quietly the dry reeds whisper
In the stillness of the moor. In the gray sky
A flock of wild birds follows;
Slanting over gloomy waters.

Turmoil. In decayed hut
The spirit of putrescence flutters with black wings.
Crippled birches in the autumn wind.

Evening in deserted tavern. The way home is scented all around
By the soft gloom of grazing herds;
Apparition of the night; toads plunge from brown waters.”
― Georg Trakl

“Maybe,' he said hesitantly, 'maybe there is a beast.'
The assembly cried out savagely and Ralph stood up in amazement.
'You, Simon? You believe in this?'
'I don't know,' said Simon. 'But . . .'
His heartbeats were choking him.
The storm broke.
'Sit down!'
'Shut up!'
'Take the conch!'
'Sod you!'
'Shut up!'
Ralph shouted.
'Hear him! He's got the conch!'
'What I mean is. Maybe . . . it's only us.'
'Nuts!'
That was Piggy, shocked out of decorum.
'We could be sort of . . .'
Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind's essential illness.”
― William Golding

“Humans will be like decayed gentry. We'll have the glorious mansion called the past that is falling into disrepair. We'll have a piece of land that we didn't look after very well called the planet. And we'll have some nice clothes and a lot of stories. We'll be fading aristocracy. We'll be Blanche Dubois in a moth-eaten silk dress. We'll be Marie Antionette with no cake.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“Franz said 'Your picture, Viki, suggests that sense of breaking-up we feel in the modern world. Families, nations, classes, other loyalty groups falling apart. Things changing before you get to know them. Death on the installment plan – or decay by jumps. Instantaneous birth. Something out of nothing. Reality replacing science fiction so fast that you can't tell which is which. Constant sense of deja-vu - 'I was here before, but when, how?' Even the possibility that there's no real continuity between events, just inexplicable gaps. And of course every gap – every crack – means a new perching place for horror.”
― Fritz Leiber

“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, Pious

“What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer's fiction? Elegant self-control concealing from the world's eyes until the very last moment a state of inner disintegration and biological decay; sallow ugliness, sensuously marred and worsted, which nevertheless is able to fan its smouldering concupiscence to a pallid impotence, which from the glowing depths of the spirit draws strength to cast down a whole proud people at the foot of the Cross and set its own foot upon them as well; gracious poise and composure in the empty austere service of form; the false, dangerous life of the born deceiver, his ambition and his art which lead so soon to exhaustion ---”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“Poetry is what he turns to these days, finding in its fragmentation the proper echo of the disintegrating world.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“[Pope] Clement waved his hands in irritation as if to dismiss the very idea. "The world is crumbling into ruin. Armies are marching. Men and women are dying everywhere, in huge numbers. Fields are abandoned and towns deserted. The wrath of the Lord is upon us and He may be intending to destroy the whole of creation. People are without leaders and direction. They want to be given a reason for this, so they can be reassured, so they will return to their prayers and their obiediences. All this is going on, and you are concerned about the safety of two Jews?”
― Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio

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

“I command you to leave me at once, for your ideas and phantasies are but the illusions that creep like maggots into civilizations when they begin to decline, and into minds when they begin to decay.”
― W.B. Yeats, Rosa Alchemica

“Gosto de imaginar que não é a decadência que nos mata mas a obscuridade que nos conduz até ela como uma íman.
I like to imagine that is not the decay that kills us but the darkness that leads us to it as a magnet.”
― Victor Eustáquio

“I’ve no great cause to love that spot of earth,
Which holds what might have been the noblest nation;
But though I owe it little but my birth,
I feel a mixed regret and veneration
For its decaying fame and former worth.
Seven years (the usual term of transportation)
Of absence lay one’s old resentments level,
When a man’s country ’s going to the devil.

Alas! could she but fully, truly, know
How her great name is now throughout abhorred:
How eager all the earth is for the blow
Which shall lay bare her bosom to the sword;
How all the nations deem her their worst foe,
That worse than worst of foes, the once adored
False friend, who held out freedom to mankind,
And now would chain them, to the very mind:—

Would she be proud, or boast herself the free,
Who is but first of slaves? The nations are
In prison,—but the gaoler, what is he?
No less a victim to the bolt and bar.
Is the poor privilege to turn the key
Upon the captive, freedom? He ’s as far
From the enjoyment of the earth and air
Who watches o’er the chain, as they who wear.”
― Lord Byron, Don Juan

“...the horror text ... is pop culture’s own penicillin, a medicine obtained from decay which, taken in the right dose, can inoculate us from fear.”
― Benjamin Poole, SAW

“I want time to stop, beauty never decay”
― Somayah M. Yahya, Thoughts To Live

“I didn’t survive — i just kept decaying.
A quiet truth for the forgotten.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia

“He hated his vanity, but it was a characteristic and nearly altogether unavoidable trait of the attractive. Perhaps it was self-preservation—simply his body urging him to protect it and maintain its appeal. The world loved and scorned the decay of beauty; it gnashed its teeth for a scrap of any withered thing, all the more if it had once been something lovely.”
― Molly Collier, The Paragon

“People say that the whole human frame in all its parts and divisions is gradually in the act of decaying and renewing. What a curious time-piece it would be that could indicate to us the moment this gradual and insensible change had so completely taken place that no atom was left of the original person but there existed in his stead another person - a new ship built on an old plank. Singular - to be at one another and the same.”
― Walter Scott, The Journal of Sir Walter Scott