Donald Barthelme Quotes

If you improve or tinker with something long enough, eventually it will break or malfunction.

All things deteriorate in time.

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.

When the forces that hold it together go away, the body must fall.

I am crumbling in sync with old Hackney.

Nothing in Chicago seems to be working the way it’s supposed to.

This system isn't working.

Film, if properly cared for, will last almost 100 years, but digital will not.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you.

Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.

Rust, corrosion, wind, rain. The nibbling teeth of mice and the acrid droppings of insects and the devouring jaws of years. The was of nature upon machines, of the planet's chaotic forces upon the works of humankind. The energy that man had pulled from the earth was being inexorably pulled back into it, sucked like water down a drain. Before long, if it hadn't happened already, not a single high-tension pole would be left standing on the earth. Mankind had built a world that would take a hundred years to die. A century for the last light to go out.

What the Chronics are - or most of us - are machines with flaws inside that can't be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot.

Bricks are crumbling in places, and the front door is so swollen you have to push hard to get in

Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.

Things seem to fall apart inevitably.

You can still function as a living ruin.

I was like a clock that had exploded- my springs were hanging out, my hands were cockeyed, and my numbers were falling off.

Scientists have been struck by the fact that things that break down virtually never get lost, while things that get lost hardly ever break down.

I'm falling into disrepair

Everything that comes together falls apart.

Everything degenerates in the hands of man.

To repair the irreparable ravages of time.

We live ruins amid ruins.

Looks like a sand pile my kids have been playing in for a long time - it's all beat up - no definition - just a lot of bumps and holes.