biological decay Quotes

The shelf life of molecules is very short. Ninety-eight percent of all the atoms in my body are gone by next year.

All bodies are slow in growth but rapid in decay.

People are just like farm equipment. They rust out quicker than they wear out.

We must all either wear out or rust out, every one of us. My choice is to wear out.

Perhaps the simplest example is a synthetic plastic, which unlike natural materials, is not degraded by biological decay. It therefore persists as rubbish or is burned-in both cases causing pollution. In the same way, a substance such as DDT or lead, which plays no role in the chemistry of life and interferes with the actions of substances that do, is bound to cause ecological damage if sufficiently concentrated.

We’re beings toward death, we’re … two-legged, linguistically-conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.

The colors of living things begin to fade with the last breath, and the soft, springy skin and supple muscle rot within weeks. But the bones sometimes remain, faithful echoes of the shape, to bear some last faint witness to the glory of what was.

One can descend by imperceptible degree from the most perfect creature to the most shapeless matter, from the best-organised animal to the roughest mineral.

Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips.

Growing and decaying vegetation in this land are responsible for 93 percent of the oxides of nitrogen.

Dead isn’t angels or ghosts. It’s a physical state of breakdown, a change in all those carbon atoms that create the temporary house of a body so that they can return to their most elemental stage.

The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.

As soon as one is born, one starts dying.

Aging is just like any deterioration of the body. It fulfills every category of what we call a disease except one: it impacts more than half the population.

You do not die all at once. Some tissues live on for minutes, even hours, giving still their little cellular shrieks, molecular echoes of the agony of the whole corpus.

We're all dying. We're all in the process of oxidizing. Everyone of us is in the process of oxidizing, so to sort of interrupt one aspect of that while everything else goes on, it's a freak show.

Earth has waited for them, All the time of their growth Fretting for their decay: Now she has them at last.