Quotes about Decay

The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

A temple was never perfectly a temple, till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs.

And as to you corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me, I smell the white roses sweetscented and growing, I reach to the leafy lips . . . . I reach to the polished breasts of melons.

An aching tooth is better out than in. To lose a rotting member is a gain.

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas.

Lord Henry went out to the garden and found Dorian Gray burying his face in the great cool lilac-blossoms, feverishly drinking in their perfume as if it had been wine. He came close to him and put his hand upon his shoulder. You are quite right to do that, he murmured. Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

Each narrow cell in which we dwell Is a foul and dark latrine, And the fetid breath of living Death Chokes up each grated screen, And all, but Lust, is turned to dust In Humanity's machine.

Without purpose, the days would have ended, as such days always end, in disintegration.

Beneath the quilt she is no more than a bundle of rotten sticks

The boys were dancing. The pile was so rotten, and now so tinder-dry, that whole limbs yielded passionately to the yellow flames that poured upwards and shook a great beards of flame twenty feet in the air. For yards round the fire the heat was like a blow, and the breeze was a river of sparks. Trunks crumbled to a white dust.

Roger's arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins.

Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.