Slow Decay Quotes

There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.

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

It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.

Imitate time; it destroys everything slowly; it undermines, it wears away, it detaches, it does not wrench.

We dribble away our life, little by little, in small packages - we don't throw it away all at once.

It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out.

I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

It's a Hollywood screenwriting notion that change comes because of one epic, soul-crushing event... What's more common is that the slow decay of the nonevents of your life build up until you can't take it anymore.

It was a real whale, a photograph of a real whale. I looked into its tiny wise eye and wondered where that eye was now. Was it alive and swimming, or had it died long ago, or was it dying now, right this second? When a whale dies, it falls down through the ocean slowly, over the course of a day. All the other fish see it fall, like a giant statue, like a building, but slowly, slowly.

You just watch somebody you love slowly, slowly disappear and go away.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

Most organizations don't fall apart as a result of one big blow. Most relationships don't end because of one grand argument. Most lives don't fall to pieces due to one sad event. No, I suggest to you that sustained failure happens as the consequence of small, daily acts of neglect that stack up over time to lead to a blow up - and break down.

There is a classic moment in ‘The Sun Also Rises’ when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, “Gradually and then suddenly.” When someone asks how I lost my mind, that’s all I can say too.

So peaceful shalt thou end thy blissful days, And steal thyself from life by slow decays.