Paul Valery Quotes

But time has set its maggot on their track.

Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.

There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world but no ruined stones.

It takes a long time to make me beautiful, but it goes fast to make me ugly.

What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?

The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries itself the causes of its destruction.

If a building has been condemned or it's left to ruin, I get so upset. I feel something really deeply about it. I don't like to see anything neglected.

Fire consumes, but cold preserves.

Things break all the time. Glass and dishes and fingernails. Cars and contracts and potato chips. You can break a record, a horse, a dollar. You can break the ice. There are coffee breaks and lunch breaks and prison breaks. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Chains can be broken. So can silence, and fever... promises break. Hearts break.

Statues lined the stairs and stood, dotted across the roof. But they had been brutalized by time and the weather. Some were missing arms. Many had no faces. Once they had been saints and angels. Two hundred years standing in London had turned them into cripples.

A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence.

I'm falling into disrepair

Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don't put it in a list. Don't even say the words.

Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart. Since fight club, I can wiggle half the teeth in my jaw. Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer. Maybe self-destruction is the answer.

How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.

Between the kitchen and the destroyed chapel a door led into an oval-shaped library. The space inside seemed safe except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa two months earlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds.

...there are some children who aren't really children at all, they're just pillars of flame that burn everything they touch. And there are some children who are just pillars of ash, that fall apart when you touch them..." ~ Thomas Builds-the-Fire (played by Evan Adams) in Alexie's "Smoke Signals

There are few sights sadder than a ruined book.

The path of increase is slow, but the road to ruin is rapid.

Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it.

Hope is such a beautiful word, but it often seems very fragile. Life is still being needlessly hurt and destroyed.

It don't take long to kill things. Not like it does to grow.

We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.