#decay

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. ↗

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

#decay #english-literature #king #poetry #power

Movement turns dead dogs into maggots and daisies, and flour butter sugar an egg and a tablespoon of milk into Abernethy biscuits, and spermatozoa and ovaries into fishy little plants growing babyward if we take no care to stop them. ↗

— Alasdair Gray

#birth #creation #death #decay #growth

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

#decay #deceit #fiction #form #writers

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

#decay #imagination

Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay. ↗

— Robert Browning

#autumn #best #decay #mute #sympathy

And in the afternoon they entered a land - but such a land! A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay. ↗

— George Washington Cable

#darkened #decay #entered #gigantic #hung

The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and establishment of the new constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism. ↗

— John C. Calhoun

#between #confusion #constitutes #decay #error

Everything will change. The only question is growing up or decaying. ↗

— Nikki Giovanni

#decaying #everything #growing #growing up #only

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

#art #break #change #changeable #decay

There is something in the decay of nature that awakens thought, even in the most trifling mind. ↗

— Sarah Josepha Hale

#decay #even #mind #most #nature