Decay Quotes

“The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.”
― Alfred Tennyson, Tithonus

“Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.”
― Alfred Tennyson, Tithonus

“The sun sets and it is another reminder of the sheer fragility of time, a reminder that death and decay are always closer than we think”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Nights

“Every blessed space is both child and grandchild of dissolution,
for that which is stored up drains away. And Daphne, in her metamorphosis,
as she feels herself becoming a laurel, wishes that you evanesce into the wind.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“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 dead don't feel. The dead don't dream. They rot, they decay”
― Gauri Sharma, Of Vengeance and Ashes

“Amidst this paradoxical existence emerges a dichotomy – a world dying outside, while we, ensnared in our paradisiacal illusion, merely survive without truly living.”
― Ryan Gelpke, Path to Choquequirao: A Short Story Collection

“You know we are doomed anyway, right?
Beg your pardon?
No matter what we do, what we archive, what status we have, how much material wealth we acquire, we all die. Some of us in terrible pain whilst we do so… Life is inherently cruel, there is no other way of putting it.”
― Ryan Gelpke, 2018: Our Summer of Creeping Boredom and Beautiful Shimmering

“I like seeing construction, even if it's just renovation, because it symbolizes one thing: Hope. If tomorrow looks worse than today, and the day after looks worse than tomorrow, and despair permeates the air, then decay defeats repair.”
― Jarod Kintz, Powdered Saxophone Music

“Well, everything that's ancient must decay.' 'You can't fight time,' I must have said. And Emrys snapped back, 'It's not time I'm worried about, darling girl. The only enemy is the sea.' ...”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“We all have to die one day, we might as well die with some obscure meaning attached to it.”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Nights

“Here, be amongst that which disappears, and in the Kingdom of the running-down,
be a resounding glass, which shatters with the sound.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“Does time really exist, time the destroyer?
When will it break down the castle into mere fragments?
When will this heart which has always been in the service of the gods
Be governed by the Creator, the Demiurge?

Are we really so desperately fragile
As Fate would wish to make us?
Is childhood, which is so deep, so full of promise,
Later stilled at its root?

Oh, the spectre of perishability,
How it infiltrates and passes through the innocently receptive,
As if it were smoke!

And we, we who are drifting,
We still rank as a divine rite
Amongst those lasting Powers.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“Society has reached such extreme heights of absurdity, and massive depths of depravity, that I can no longer accurately distinguish between truth and satire. That line is as blurry as Bigfoot.”
― Jarod Kintz, A Memoir of Memories and Memes

“One must speak for life and growth, amid all this mass of destruction and disintegration.”
― D.H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume 3, October 1916–June 1921

“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

“As Carcosa crumbled away, it was like the end of an era. That mysterious glow around it faded, leaving just traces of what used to be. It felt like a story within the story. The name Carcosa, which used to sound like some secret code, now just hangs in the air like a faint memory.”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Nights

“Abundance wears many faces. The got of plenty is also the god of decay. There can be no life without death, no feast without famine.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Six Scorched Roses

“His long jacket, so black in the semi-darkness, had about it, in the sunlight, a greenish tinge that suggested decay.”
― Mervyn Peake, Boy in Darkness

“Still waters may run deep, but stagnant pools breed decay. Embrace the current, and find your flow.”
― Monika Ajay Kaul

“Smelled like home. Stink permeates homelessness: the smell of trash, the smell of dirty streets, of fire bins and piss and other people's body odor, the wet dog smell that saturates your clothes and bedding, the smell of rust and dirt and decay.”
― Duncan Ralston, Where the Monsters Live

“How long had his widow lived on here, beside the silent forge, with the grass growing up against the closed double doors, and six-feet-tall mallows drowning the hen-run, the potato-plot, the drying-ground? Piles of washing there must have been in the old days - husbands toiling with horses in smoke, children in and out of dikes and marshes. I imagined her coming through the tall grass of the orchard, with an apronful of windfalls, petals and pollen, and a wispy moth stuck to her skirt.”
― Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Summer Notebook

“I had evidently disturbed the bird from its perch which, on closer inspection, turned out to be something called the Bentinck Fountain. It had clearly seen glories greater than the poor laurels tossed its way now. Once it had been cherished as an effecting feature of a grand estate. Now it stood apologetically by the side of the road, its empty trough sticking out like a beggar's imploring hand.”
― Dixe Wills, At Night: A Journey Round Britain from Dusk Till Dawn

“Twig, leaf, flint, thorn,
Straw, feather, all that men scorn,
Pounded up and sodden by flood,
Condemned as mud.”
― Edward Thomas, Selected Poems and Prose

“and then do we consider it something that constantly decays, an atom is an atom is an atom is an atom, do physiological effects mutate, an atom is not an atom is not an atom is not an atom, does radiation mean decay, that people live through an eternal eternity means that life is not living nor is it life but it is light and it is it is.”
― Yi Sang, Yi Sang: Selected Works

“The greatest evil the world has ever done is killing nature after consuming from its generous hands.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, These Words Pour Like Rain

“...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