Top 100 Quotes About Decaying
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. We know that our senses are subject to decay, that from our middle years they are decaying all the time; but happily it is as if we didn't know and didn't believe.
William Henry Hudson
#4. 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
#5. But to a dog, the stench of a decaying rat probably smells like Chanel No. 5.
Stephen King
#6. this history will soon be swept away by the Waterless Flood. Nothing will remain of the Exfernal World but decaying wood and rusting metal implements; and
Margaret Atwood
#7. 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
#8. Today every city, town, or village is affected by it. We have entered the Neon Civilization and become a plastic world.. It goes deeper than its visual manifestations, it affects moral matters; we are engaged, as astrophysicists would say, on a decaying orbit.
Raymond Loewy
#9. In the oddity or maybe the miracle of life, the roots of something new frequently lie in the decaying husks of something old.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#10. The most vigorous expression of a resolution does not always coincide with the greatest vigour of the resolution itself. It is often flung out as a sort of prop to support a decaying conviction which, whilst strong, required no enunciation to prove it so.
Thomas Hardy
#11. 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
#12. As the wind continued to howl and groan through her decaying body, she began to sing her story.
Ken Liu
#13. It was the sick and decaying who despised the body and earth and invented the heavenly realm and the redemptive drops of blood: but they took even these sweet and gloomy poisons from body and earth. They wanted to escape their own misery, and the stars were too far for them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Those who remember New York in the 1970s, as I do, look back on a city that had hit a very rough patch - decaying, bankrupt, and crime-ridden. But fun.
Graydon Carter
#17. If you go out in the country, spend a lot of time on decaying farms, and you see a lot of crumbling tobacco farms, and wandering the woods, there's something beneath the surface; there's something older ... more sinister.
Cullen Bunn
#18. My habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression, fell damp on the embers of my decaying ire.
Charlotte Bronte
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. I stopped and filled my lungs, smelling Africa - smelling dust, woodsmoke, a perfume from a flower, something musty, something decaying.
William Boyd
#22. When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.
Mark Twain
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Despotism, which we regard with abhorrence, is rather too plausible in decaying feudal, agrarian, pastoral societies. That's why we must expect to have many a defeat before we'll have an ultimate victory in this contest with Communism.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Pueblo, Colorado, a corrupt and decaying mining town high in the Rockies, is the setting for Heidi Julavits's The Mineral Palace, a story of motherhood, a troubled marriage, and the unveiling of long-held secrets.
Nancy Pearl
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Amid these fading and decaying things, be the glass that rings out as it's breaking.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#32. For five hundred years, Baghdad had been a city of palaces, mosques, libraries and colleges. Its universities and hospitals were the most up-to-date in the world. Nothing now remained but heaps of rubble and a stench of decaying human flesh.
John Bagot Glubb
#33. 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
#34. This is the beginning There are no beginnings or endings We are here Learning And creating and destroying Growing and decaying I want to share with the world and be loved But it always starts with me. The stone dropped Creates the ripples
Isa Ritchie
#35. 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
#36. My parents are both English. My dad is a plastic surgeon - his name's Norman Waterhouse, but we call him Normy. And my mom's a nurse, which is how they met - in a hospital, over decaying bone.
Suki Waterhouse
#37. In Heaven, our bodies are going to be the same make, but a new model. Our old, decaying, worn-out natural, physical body will go back to the dust. We will trade it in for an entirely new heavenly model!
David Berg
#38. He dared to explore her withered neck w/his fingertips ... her hips w/their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#39. 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
#40. My faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.
Mark Twain
#41. ... 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
#42. Who would have listened to his tales of woe when his love was the flickering lamp over his own decaying tomb?
Faraaz Kazi
#43. It is the growing periphery of the Arab world - the masses at its margins, not its feeble and decaying center - that is shaping the future of the region.
Wadah Khanfar
#44. In this decaying world, these moments with her help keep me sane.
Thomm Quackenbush
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. The darkness amplifies the stench of decaying flesh- Random thought
Jerry W. McKinney
#49. 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
#50. Love never stands still; it must inevitably be either growing or decaying - especially the love of marriage.
Dinah Maria Murlock Craik
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. I am life without boundaries. The decaying of this body does not mean the end of me. I am not limited to this body.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#54. I always try to be alert to the potential for repetition, for a decaying orbit with regard to my use of technique, etc.
Jeff VanderMeer
#55. Like the deepest secrets in a psychoanalysis, our lives stay hidden, harboring our precious information like a piece of decaying food behind a major molar in our country's maw,
Larry Kramer
#56. For a fleeting moment, Adam could imagine it: the brocade curtains in decaying flames, the decorated consorts screaming from beneath the harpsichord, Ronan standing among it all saying Fuck Washington.
Maggie Stiefvater
#57. Sweep up the debris of decaying faith;
Sweep down the cobwebs of worn-out out beliefs,
And throw your soul wide open to the light of reason and of knowledge.
Be not afraid
To thrust aside half-truths and grasp the whole.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Societies who do not care for their young people and old people are decadent, decaying societies.
Suzan Shown Harjo
#61. At the rate America is decaying morally, we shall have to change our national symbol from an eagle to a vulture.
Vance Havner
#62. The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without.
T. S. Eliot
#63. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
Chuck Palahniuk
#64. 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
#65. It was a sign of decaying culture, of course, that dams had been built against the further development of ideas.
Isaac Asimov
#66. The whole Pelagian poison of free-will ... a clear exaltation of the old idol free-will into the throne of God ... That the decaying estate of Christianity have invented.
John Owen
#67. Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man. He that grows old without religions hopes, as he declines into imbecility, and feels pains and sorrows incessantly crowding upon him, falls into a gulf of bottomless misery, in which every reflection must plunge him deeper and deeper.
Samuel Johnson
#68. Proponents of privatization argued that cities and states needed private capital to fund all the upgrades that our decaying infrastructure so desperately needed.
Bethany McLean
#69. 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
#70. E'en Beauty mourns in her decaying bower,
That Time upon her angel brow should set
His crooked autograph, and mar the jet
Of glossy locks. Lo! how her chaplet green,
The hoar frost and the canker worm destroy.
Decay's dull film obscures those matchless eyes.
Isaac McLellan
#71. The day you stop learning is the day you begin decaying.
Isaac Asimov
#72. 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
#73. In old grimy streets, in isolated and decaying houses, sometimes far from the Vieux Carre, in little used and secluded cemeteries, there still sluggishly circulates the ebbing blood of the past, of a vigorous and vividly hued past.
Clarence John Laughlin
#74. the adaptive nature of our brain inevitably follows that we, and only we can decide which part of our mind to cultivate, and which part to leave withering and decaying.
Yamada Takumi
#76. All those decaying zombies eating people and tearing out their guts." She laughed. "Cool!
R.L. Stine
#77. For after the subject is removed or the eye shut, we still retain an image of the things seen, though more obscure than when we see it ... Imagination, therefore, is nothing more than decaying sense.
Thomas Hobbes
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. The boundary between expert and amateur was an imposed social-cultural "protection" which actually exposed a number of women to a fatal disease, because decaying matter, as the fireman said of fire (cited in the book's final piece, "Torch Song") "ain't got no rules on it."
Laura Mullen
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. He hums a little. He's a really old guy with an English accent, he might have a goatee, and he'll definitely be carrying around a really thick, boring book. You might be able to pry it from his decaying hands and beat him back to death with it. Or maybe just reading it to him would work.
Kasie West
#84. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, what the hell did that
mean anyway? Was it supposed to be a consoling thought,
understanding her mother was now nothing more than decaying flesh
and bones?
Christopher C. Payne
#85. The Bloodsucker Queen has lived for what, a millennium? She can wait on her decaying ass a little while longer.
Heather Heffner
#86. The decaying that had dragged on for too long had only turned tragedy into nuisance; death, when it strikes, better completes its annihilating act on the first try.
Yiyun Li
#88. 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
#89. The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him.
Henry David Thoreau
#90. 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
#91. Growing and decaying vegetation in this land are responsible for 93 percent of the oxides of nitrogen.
Ronald Reagan
#92. The money has always been wasted on me. I don't care for beautiful things, funnily enough. I am my father's daughter. The things that excite me are the smell of a wood-burning stove, uncultivated fields. My house is decaying and falling to pieces. It's not had the love it deserves over twenty years.
Alison Moyet
#93. 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
#94. Shouts of dismay rose as the red flesh splattered against the table. It was only a tomato, but one would think I was pulping a decaying heart by the noise the big, strong FIB officers were making.
Kim Harrison
#95. We are all of us daily decaying, after all; the speed is our only variant.
Lyndsay Faye
#96. The reality was decaying, dingy cities, where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses
George Orwell
#97. 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
#98. Either you're growing or you're decaying; there's no middle ground. If you're standing still, you're decaying.
Alan Arkin
#99. The fanciful theory that a person's life was etched on their physical form - be it despair, happiness, or in this case sheer depravity - was entirely disproved by Blaine. That, or she already had a huge portrait or herself slowly decaying in the attic.
Tabitha McGowan
#100. Everything will change. The only question is growing up or decaying.
Nikki Giovanni
