gradual decay Quotes

… the silent artillery of time

At the touch of mankind, things wear away with heartbreaking slowness.

Death’s a funny thing. I used to think it was a big, sudden thing, like a huge owl that would swoop down out of the night and carry you off. I don’t anymore. I think it’s a slow thing. Like a thief who comes to your house day after day, taking a little thing here and a little thing there, and one day you walk round your house and there’s nothing there to keep you, nothing to make you want to stay. And then you lie down and shut up forever. Lots of little deaths until the last big one.

Interest works night and day in fair weather and in foul. It gnaws at a man's substance with invisible teeth.

Oh each successive night that comes has something in it of an abandoned ember that is slowly burning out, and it falls swathed in ruins, surrounded by funereal objects.

In Germany democracy died by the headman's axe. In Britain it can be by pernicious anaemia.

We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.

Statesmen and beauties are very rarely sensible of the gradations of their decay.

Little by little, the old world crumbled, and not once did the king imagine that some of the pieces might fall on him.

The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay, or dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint, and too numerous for removal.

Life, for people, begins to crumble on the edges; they don't realize it.

The young disease, that must subdue at length, Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength.

It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation, consuming itself from within, ending at every moment but never ending its ending.