Elvis Costello Quotes

Throughout the whole vegetable, sensible, and rational world, whatever makes progress towards maturity, as soon as it has passed that point, begins to verge towards decay.

The essence of decay is inactivity.

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

It is not all bad, this getting old, ripening. After the fruit has got its growth it should juice up and mellow. God forbid I should live long enough to ferment and rot and fall to the ground in a squash.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

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

Absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay.

When you stay too long in the same place, things and people go to pot on you, they rot and start stinking for your special benefit.

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.

History is moving the furniture around in the house of mankind just about everywhere but the U.S.A. Things have changed, except here, where people come and go through the rooms of state, and everything looks shabbier by the day, and lethargy eats away at the upholstery like an acid fog, and the walls reverberate with meaningless oratory.

I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I'd like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit.

The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.

Long, continuous periods of peace and prosperity have always brought about the physical, mental and moral deterioration of the individual.

Macmillan seemed, in his very person, to embody the national decay he supposed himself to be confuting. He exuded a flavor of mothballs.

The worst kind of decline is a slow decline—slow enough not to notice that you are in decline.

The nation which is satisfied is lost. The nation which is not progressive is retrograding.

The older you get, the less physically and mentally robust you become.

Age is inevitable. Aging isn't.

Nobody stays young forever.

If you're not getting better, you're getting worse.

To grow up requires a whole life but to become old one night is enough.

Stagnation is something worse than death. It is corruption, also.

You're aging when your actions creak louder than your words.

I found I was repeating myself. It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.

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