Decay Of The Angel Quotes

She was not happy--she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency in life--this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leaned? But if there were somewhere a being strong and beautiful, a valiant nature, full at once of exaltation and refinement, a poet's heart in an angel's form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing out elegiac epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find him? Ah! How impossible! Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight.

كان الاضطرار إلى الحياة أكثر سواداً من أشد ضروب السواد افتقاراً للمرح, أن يضطر كل يوم لرؤية رجل يسعى لفهم أعمق شيء بداخله, وينجح في ذلك.

The perfectly ordinary girl and the great philosopher are alike: for both, the smallest triviality can become the vision that wipes out the world.

كل ما لديه حقاً كان شعوراً جارفاً بالحماقة وبالابتذال, وقد ذاب متحولاً إلى رتابة. كم هي هائلة تجليات العادي والمبتذل! ابتذال التأنق, ابتذال العاج, ابتذال القداسة, ابتذال الجنون, ابتذال ذوي المعرفة الواسعة, ابتذال الأكاديمي المدعي, الابتذال المغناج, ابتذال القطة الفارسية, ابتذال الملوك والشحاذين والمعتوهين والفراشات.

History knew the truth. History was the most inhuman product of humanity. It scooped up the whole of human will and, like the goddess Kali in Calcutta, dripped blood from its mouth as it bit and crunched.

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit and let the sounds of music Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony. Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold: There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins; Such harmony is in immortal souls; But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

In this way of thinking, the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it's a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don't have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.

It's possible, and I stress possible, that such a moment may never come: you may not fall in love, you may not be able to or you may not wish to give your whole life to anyone, and, like me, you may turn forty-five one day and realize that you're no longer young and you have never found a choir of cupids with lyres or a bed of white roses leading to the altar. The only revenge left for you then will be to steal from life the pleasure of firm and passionate flesh - a pleasure that evaporates faster than good intentions and is the nearest thing to heaven you will find in this stinking world where everything decays, beginning with beauty and ending with memory.

I am a book. Sheaves pressed from the pulp of oaks and pines a natural sawdust made dingy from purses, dusty from shelves. Steamy and anxious, abused and misused, kissed and cried over, smeared, yellowed, and torn, loved, hated, scorned. I am a book. I am a book that remembers, days when I stood proud in good company When the children came, I leapt into their arms, when the women came, they cradled me against their soft breasts, when the men came, they held me like a lover, and I smelled the sweet smell of cigars and brandy as we sat together in leather chairs, next to pool tables, on porch swings, in rocking chairs, my words hanging in the air like bright gems, dangling, then forgotten, I crumbled, dust to dust. I am a tale of woe and secrets, a book brand-new, sprung from the loins of ancient fathers clothed in tweed, born of mothers in lands of heather and coal soot. A family too close to see the blood on its hands, too dear to suffering, to poison, to cold steel and revenge, deaf to the screams of mortal wounding, amused at decay and torment, a family bred in the dankest swamp of human desires. I am a tale of woe and secrets, I am a mystery. I am intrigue, anxiety, fear, I tangle in the night with madmen, spend my days cloaked in black, hiding from myself, from dark angels, from the evil that lurks within and the evil we cannot lurk without. I am words of adventure, of faraway places where no one knows my tongue, of curious cultures in small, back alleys, mean streets, the crumbling house in each of us. I am primordial fear, the great unknown, I am life everlasting. I touch you and you shiver, I blow in your ear and you follow me, down foggy lanes, into places you've never seen, to see things no one should see, to be someone you could only hope to be. I ride the winds of imagination on a black-and-white horse, to find the truth inside of me, to cure the ills inside of you, to take one passenger at a time over that tall mountain, across that lonely plain to a place you've never been where the world stops for just one minute and everything is right. I am a mystery. -Rides a Black and White Horse

Zombies smell worse than anything you can imagine if you haven’t been hunting things on the dark side of the world. It’s a ripe, gassy odour, like rotting eggs and meat gone bad, crawling blind with maggots. It’s road kill and decayed food and body odour all rolled into one package and tied up with puke.

In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.

Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within.

There is nothing in the least special about you. I guarantee you a long life. You have not been chosen by the gods, you will never be at one with your acts, you do not have in you the green light to flash like young lightning with the speed of the gods and destroy yourself. All you have is a certain premature senility. Your life will be suited for coupon-clipping. Nothing more.

That is because the most subtle and delicate wishes of evil are not for a physical wound but for a spiritual.

The hands were ivory-coloured, the skin finely wrinkled everywhere, like the crust on a pool of wax, and under it appreared livid bruises, arthritic nodes, irregular tea-brown stains. ...The flesh under the horny nails was candlvwax-coloured, and bloodless.

The tomb lies at the end of every path. Only the soul is immortal. Guard this treasure well. Your decaying husk is but a temporary vessel on an endless voyage.

.... كل ما هنالك ان احداً لم يلحظ الأمر، فنحن أكثر تعوداً مما ينبغي .على عبث الوجود. و ضياع كون ليس جديراً ان يحمل على محمل الجد

I have been self-reliant to the point of sadness. I wonder when I first fell into the habit of washing my hands after each brush with humanity, lest I be contaminated.

This book is dedicated to the Ancient Ones, to the Lord of Abominations, Humwawa, whose face is a mass of entrails, whose breath is the stench of dung and the perfume of death, Dark Angel of all that is excreted and sours, Lord of Decay, Lord of the Future, who rides on a whispering south wind, to Pazuzu, Lord of Fevers and Plagues, Dark Angel of the Four Winds with rotting genitals from which he howls through sharpened teeth over stricken cities, to Kutulu, the Sleeping Serpent who cannot be summoned, to the Akhkharu, who such the blood of men since they desire to become men, to the Lalussu, who haunt the places of men, to Gelal and Lilit, who invade the beds of men and whose children are born in secret places, to Addu, raiser of storms who can fill the night sky with brightness, to Malah, Lord of Courage and Bravery, to Zahgurim, whose number is twenty-three and who kills in an unnatural fashion, to Zahrim, a warrior among warriors, to Itzamna, Spirit of Early Mists and Showers, to Ix Chel, the Spider-Web-that-Catches-the-Dew-of-Morning, to Zuhuy Kak, Virgin Fire, to Ah Dziz, the Master of Cold, to Kak U Pacat, who works in fire, to Ix Tab, Goddess of Ropes and Snares, patroness of those who hang themselves, to Schmuun, the Silent One, twin brother of Ix Tab, to Xolotl the Unformed, Lord of Rebirth, to Aguchi, Master of Ejaculations, to Osiris and Amen in phallic form, to Hex Chun Chan, the Dangerous One, to Ah Pook, the Destroyer, to the Great Old One and the Star Beast, to Pan, God of Panic, to the nameless gods of dispersal and emptiness, to Hassan i Sabbah, Master of Assassins. To all the scribes and artists and practitioners of magic through whom these spirits have been manifested…. NOTHING IS TRUE. EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED.

the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it’s a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don’t have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.

If the cause of decay was illness, then the fundamental cause of that, the flesh, was illness too. The essence of the flesh was decay. It had its spot in time to give evidence of destruction and decay.

We are too accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously.

People do not love pets that will outlive them. A short life is a condition for love.

There was for me nothing that might have been called the pinnacle of my youth, and so no moment for stopping it. One should stop at the pinnacle. I could discern none. Strangely, I feel no regrets.

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring [making music] to the young-eyed cherubins; Such harmony is in immortal souls, But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close us in, we cannot hear it.

War has no longer the justification that it makes for the survival of the fittest; it involves the survival of the less fit. The idea that the struggle between nations is a part of the evolutionary law of man's advance involves a profound misreading of the biological analogy. The warlike nations do not inherit the earth; they represent the decaying human element.

There was no other sound. The garden was empty. He had come, thought Honda, to a place with no memories, nothing. The noontide sun of summer flowered over the still garden.

La memoria è lo specchio degli inganni

No one can know what a sacrifice it is for me to be gentle and docile.

For a Siddhar yogi, time is precious. It is important to utilize every moment to evolve into ever higher states of consciousness. We understand stagnancy as decay and for growth, we constantly discard the old to welcome change as the new. We tap into the magical abilities to evolve. "Every saint was a sinner in the past" maxim holds true. In the intensity of our yogic pursuit we evolve quickly. By evolving, we know that is the greatest gift of a lifetime we could ever receive- to be angelic as a being of consciousness. Consciousness is ever evolving and dynamic in transforming.

He was in a room of the Gesshuuji, which he had thought it would be impossible to visit. The approach of death had made the visit easy, had unloosed the weight that held him in the depths of being. It was even a comfort to think, from the light repose the struggle up the hill had brought him, that Kiyoaki, struggling against illness up that same road, had been given wings to soar with by the denial that awaited him.

History proves beyond any possibility of doubt that no religion has ever given a stimulus to scientific progress comparable to that of Islam. The encouragement which learning and scientific research received from Islamic theology resulted in the splendid cultural achievements in the days of the Umayyads and Abbasids and the Arab rule in Sicily and Spain. I do not mention this in order that we might boast of those glorious memories at a time when the Islamic world has forsaken its own traditions and reverted to spiritual blindness and intellectual poverty. We have no right, in our present misery, to boast of past glories. But we must realize that it was the negligence of the Muslims and not any deficiency in the teachings of Islam that caused our present decay. Islam has never been a barrier to progress and science. It appreciates the intellectual activities of man to such a degree as to place him above the angels. No other religion ever went so far in asserting the dominance of reason and, consequently, of learning, above all other manifestations of human life.

It is a stubble field, where a black rain is falling. It is a brown tree, that stands alone. It is a hissing wind, that encircles empty houses. How melancholy the evening is. A while later, The soft orphan garners the sparse ears of corn. Her eyes graze, round and golden, in the twilight And her womb awaits the heavenly bridegroom. On the way home The shepherd found the sweet body Decayed in a bush of thorns. I am a shadow far from darkening villages. I drank the silence of God Out of the stream in the trees. Cold metal walks on my forehead. Spiders search for my heart. It is a light that goes out in my mouth. At night, I found myself on a pasture, Covered with rubbish and the dust of stars. In a hazel thicket Angels of crystal rang out once more.

No, Mr. Honda, I have forgotten none of the blessings that were mine in the other world. But I fear I have never heard the name Kiyoaki Matsugae. Don’t you suppose, Mr. Honda, that there never was such a person? You seem convinced that there was; but don’t you suppose that there was no such person from the beginning, anywhere? I couldn’t help thinking so as I listened to you.” “Why then do we know each other? And the Ayakuras and the Matsugaes must still have family registers.” “Yes, such documents might solve problems in the other world. But did you really know a person called Kiyoaki? And can you say definitely that the two of us have met before?” “I came here sixty years ago.” “Memory is like a phantom mirror. It sometimes shows things too distant to be seen, and sometimes it shows them as if they were here.” “But if there was no Kiyoaki from the beginning—” Honda was groping through a fog. His meeting here with the Abbess seemed half a dream. He spoke loudly, as if to retrieve the self that receded like traces of breath vanishing from a lacquer tray. “If there was no Kiyoaki, then there was no Isao. There was no Ying Chan, and who knows, perhaps there has been no I.” For the first time there was strength in her eyes. “That too is as it is in each heart.

It was a bright, quiet garden, without striking features. Like a rosary rubbed between the hands, the shrilling of cicadas held sway. There was no other sound. The garden was empty. He had come, thought Honda, to a place that had no memories, nothing. The noontide sun of summer flowed over the still garden.

go-go hall on my way home from school.

He integrado una delicada maquinaria para averiguar lo que sentiría de ser humano.

They loll forever in collossal sleep; Nor can God's stern, shocked angels cry them up From their fond, final, infamous decay

I am very cautious, but I am greatly wanting in the instinct for self-preservation. And I am so brightly wanting in it that the breeze through the gap sometimes makes me drunk.

That is because one must proceed from clarity, and the smallest element of miscalculation produces fantasy, and fantasy produces beauty.

He appreciated Los Angeles, its skinny palm trees and its decaying Spanish-style homes and its occasional flocks of parrots and its smiling people who always wanted something from you.

You agency people are living testaments to justice. Frankly, your sparkle mesmerizes me. The Decay of the Angel's plan is the true embodiment of evil. That's what makes it worth assisting in! It's time to break out of this prison! The inherent brain-washing we call morality! I seek freedom for my soul more than any kind of joy!! So listen to the screams of my own free will!

The idea that the struggle between nations is a part of the evolutionary law of man's advance involves a profound misreading of the biological analogy. The warlike nations do not inherit the earth; they represent the decaying human element.

In this way of thinking, the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it’s a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don’t have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.

War has no longer the justification that it makes for the survival of the fittest; it involves the survival of the less fit. The idea that the struggle between nations is a part of the evolutionary law of man's advance involves a profound misreading of the biological analogy. The warlike nations do not inherit the earth; they represent the decaying human element....

There’s a kind of evil that isn’t even in opposition to good, because good is an irrelevance to it. It’s a foulness that’s right at the heart of existence, born with the stuff of the universe. It’s in the decay to which all things tend. It is, and it always will be, but in dying we leave it behind.” “And while we’re alive?” “We set our souls against it, and our saints and angels, too.

Honda had been looking forward to the crape myrtle in bloom, it’s blossoms shining against a trunk smooth like the white skin of a leper. But there was none. The garden had been made over, he knew, in the Alaya, the Storehouse, into a different garden. Gardens too must change. But in the instant that he so felt, uncontrollable anger came from another source. He cried out, and even as he cried he was afraid.

Dreams, memories, the sacred—they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desting, tear d touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.

Honda had been looking forward to the crape myrtle in bloom, its blossoms shining against a trunk smooth like the white skin of a leper. But there was none. The garden had been made over, he knew, in the Alaya, the Storehouse, into a different garden. Gardens too must change. But in the instant that he so felt, uncontrollable anger came from another source. He cried out, and even as he cried out he was afraid.

Beeswax, with its subtle undertones of smoke and honey. The smell of ink on wet paper, the sickly-sweet smell of decay. The sweat of clean bodies, the scent of burnt gloves. She loved the crackle of the fire and the clang of the tools. She loved the magic of sweat-streaked alchemists who blew down metal pipes and created bubbles within molten glass. She loved the flawless final chapter, the glistening undulations as smooth as ice.

Abruptly, Eugene was touched with pity. For the first time he saw plainly that great Gant had grown old. The sallow face had yellowed and lost its sinew. The thin mouth was petulant. The chemistry of decay had left its mark. No, there was no return after this. Eugene saw now that Gant was dying very slowly. The vast resiliency, the illimitable power of former times had vanished. The big frame was breaking up before him like a beached ship. Gant was sick. He was old.

The city’s streets coiled around him, writhing like serpents, London had grown unstable once again, revealing its true, capricious, tormented nature, its anguish of a city that had lost its sense of itself and wallowed, accordingly, in the impotence of its selfish, angry present of masks and parodies, stifled and twisted by the insupportable, unrejected burden of its past, staring into the bleakness of its impoverished future. He wandered its streets through that night and the next day, and the next night, and on until the light and dark ceased to matter. He no longer seemed to need food or rest, but only to move constantly through that tortured metropolis whose fabric was now utterly transformed, the houses in the rich quarters being built of solidified fear, the government buildings partly of vainglory and partly of scorn, and the residences of the poor of confusion and material dreams. When you looked through an angel’s eyes you saw essences instead of surfaces, you saw the decay of the soul blistering and bubbling on the skins of people in the street, you saw the generosity of certain spirits resting on their shoulders in the form of birds. As he roamed the metamorphosed city he saw bat-winged imps sitting on the corners of buildings made of deceits and glimpsed goblins oozing wormily through the broken tilework of public urinals for men. As once the thirteenth-century German monk Richalmus would shut his eyes and instantly see clouds of minuscule demons surrounding every man and woman on earth, dancing like dustspecks in the sunlight, so now Gibreel with open eyes and by the light of the moon as well as the sun detected everywhere the presence of his adversary, his—to give the old word back its original meaning—shaitan.

Multiple changes in the color of the sea, moment by moment. Changes in the clouds. And the appearance of a ship. What was happening? What were happenings? Each instant brought them, more momentous than the explosion of Krakatoa. It was only that no one noticed. We are too accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously. Happenings are the signals for endless reconstruction, reorganization. Signals from a distant bell. A ship appears and sets the bell to ringing. In an instant the sound makes everything its own. On the sea they are incessant, the bell forever ringing.

Ode to the West Wind I O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill: Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear! II Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion, Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface of thine aëry surge, Like the bright hair uplifted from the head Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge Of the horizon to the zenith’s height, The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear! III Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lull’d by the coil of his crystàlline streams, Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave’s intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean, know Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear! IV If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed Scarce seem’d a vision; I would ne’er have striven As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. V Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

In him (in Christ) the hope of our resurrection has dawned, and though we are saddened by the certainty of dying, He consoles us with the promise of eternal life to come. For those who are faithful to you, Lord, life is transformed, not taken away; and when our dwelling here on earth decays, there is waiting for us our eternal home in heaven.[349] God awaits us for ever in his glory. What great sadness for those who have counted solely on this world! What great joy to know that it will be ourselves, soul and body, who, with the help of grace, will live eternally with Jesus Christ, with the angels and with the saints, and who will give praise to the most Holy Trinity!

Nobody ever overcomes the phantasms of his childhood. The man is the corrupt dream of the child, and since there is only decay, and no time, what we call days and evenings are the false angels of our existence. There is nothing except sleep and the moon between the boy and the man; dogs dream and bay the moon, who is the mother of the unconscious. Sorrow and pleasure are the stuff of dreams and the energies of myriads of planets. What is the space between the boy and the man? Did the child who is now the man ever live? Did Christ exist and was Brutus at Philippi? The centuries that divide one from Jesus and Brutus contain no time. We still hear the tinkling of the sheep bells at Mamre, and Abraham continues to sleep beneath the terebinths just as Saul sits and broods underneath a tamarisk—but all these are “thoughts of the visions of the night.

Where are you taking me?” Andrew demanded, whirling on the Ferryman. His muscles tensed, hands curling in and out of fists. “To my master.” The voice was ghostly, whispers of black ash and death, words cold and detached. He had an idea who that was but asked anyway: “And who is your master?” No answer came. Andrew’s insatiable rage rose up and swallowed his grief like a yawning ocean mouth, the darkest depths surging to the surface to form a mighty tidal wave. He closed the distance and seized the Ferryman’s gaunt wrist. There was no substance, no life beneath the cloak. The Ferryman slowly turned his hooded head, and Andrew found himself looking into the black hole of a self-contained night. The olfactory of decay was a punch in the face. Andrew released the Ferryman’s wrist and hastily stepped back, rocking the boat as he put distance between him and the unnatural wind spilling from the gaping orifice. Andrew shivered, the tiny hairs on his neck saluting. The cloaked head faced forward again, and the wind died away.

ZOE given some liberty from heaven God young and a rebel Is this why you chose me up against it all I wonder what's in store for this rebel you say I reveal? but I don't think I have that rebel appeal but I am radical in a heavenly sort of way and all the other angels do look up to me but only every other day and you still love me God with delight you often say you once said "when you grow then you will know as the rebel in you will show" this rebel you say I will reveal I don't think I have that rebel appeal but I am radical in a moral religious purity way but all the other angels did say that I really should read that Bible before I pray my morals do seem to sway sent to this world of giveaway this world of moral decay get these sinners back on side fixated on my holy ride this rebel you say I reveal I don't think I have that rebel appeal I know this rebel you want to see but this rebel I don't think it is in me revolutionist revolutionary rebellious rebelliously rebel I don't think I am but I do like to sell God's plan

The sea was a dull, monotonous green. Slowly, the tide was coming in. Tōru lowered the telescope to the waves of the beach. As they broke, a spray like the dregs of the sea slipped from their backs, and the pyramids of deep green changed, rose and swelled into an uneasy white. The sea lost its serenity. Even as it rose it broke at the skirts, and ragged spots of white from its high belly like a call of inexpressible sorrow became a sharply smooth yet infinitely cracked wall of glass, like a vast spray. As it rose and broke, the forelocks were combed a beautiful white, and as it fell it showed the neatly arrayed blue-white of its crown, and the lines of white became a solid field of white; and so it fell, like a severed head. The spray and the falling away of foam. Little patches of foam trailing off to sea like lines of water bugs. From trailing off over the sand like swear from the back of an athlete at the end of his exertions. What delicate changes passed over the white monolith of the sea as it came in upon the shore and broke. The myriad confusion of thin waves and the fine partings of the foam became in desperation an infinity of lines spewed out over the sea as from silkworms. What a subtle evil, overcoming by sheer force even as it took into itself this delicate white.

Tipped, their legs have fallen shut, and the more I look at them the less I believe my eyes. Corruption, in these bugs, is splendid. I've a collection now I keep in typewriter-ribbon tins, and though, in time, their bodies dry and the interior flesh decays, their features hold, as I suppose they held in life, an Egyptian determination, for their protective plates are strong and death must break bones to get in. Now that the heavy soul is gone, the case is light. I suspect if we were as familiar with our bones as with our skin, we'd never bury dead but shrine them in their rooms, arranged as we might like to find them on a visit; and our enemies, if we could steal their bodies from the battle sites, would be museumed as they died, the steel still eloquent in their sides, their metal hats askew, the protective toes of their shoes unworn, and friend and enemy would be so wondrously historical that in a hundred years we'd find the jaws still hung for the same speech and all the parts we spent our life with tilted as they always were—rib cage collar skull—still repetitious, still defiant, angel light, still worthy of memorial and affection. After all, what does it mean to say that when our cat has bitten through the shell and put confusion in the pulp, the life goes out of them? Alas for us, I want to cry, our bones are secret, so we must love what perishes: the muscles and the waters and the fats.

Possibility swelled inside of me like a sponge absorbing the moisture of the moment—the man, the feeling that an epic story had just been hatched. It replaced my own small meandering, domestic tale of disaffection and decay and set me loose on a tide of romance. It was a perfect storm, and Spade was the perfect pirate. Los Angeles, Fall 1988 I met my husband on my first day in Los Angeles.

Returning home The shepherds found the sweet body Decayed in the thorn-bush. I am a shadow far from sombre villages. God's silence I drank from the spring in the grove. Cold metal enters upon my brow, Spiders seek out my heart. There is a light that goes out in my mouth. At night I found myself on a heath, Stiff with refuse and dust of stars. In the hazel-bush Crystalline angels sounded again.

The only revenge left for you then will be to steal from life the pleasure of firm and passionate flesh--a pleasure that evaporates faster than good intentions and is the nearest thing to heaven you will find in this stinking world where everything decays, beginning with beauty and ending with memory.

He, like dead Rephain, was one of those bright blooms that grow quickly flaccid on the vine, eaten by decay in an evening’s rain.

There were doomed virgins (downcast eyes, clasped hands), and imitations of mortality, skin like marble, faces like masques, a supernatural radiance, the phosphorescent glow we sometimes attribute to angels, and to decaying flesh.

Then there is levitation, of which there are between two hundred and three hundred historical cases in the descriptions of the saints, including Saint Joseph of Cupertino (1603–1663). Saint Joseph was observed to levitate by thousands of witnesses, usually in broad daylight, over a period of thirty-five years. Reports can be found in witnesses’ private diaries and in depositions provided under oath, including 150 eyewitness reports from popes, kings, and princesses.97 Purely secular cases of levitation also exist, including most famously that of the Scottish medium Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–1886).98 Like Saint Joseph, Home was observed to levitate in daylight by dozens of prominent witnesses. Not a single case of fraud was ever discovered. Other charisms include bilocation, in which the mystic is observed to appear in two distant places at the same time; fragrances, or the “odor of sanctity,” issuing from the mystic’s body or clothes; inedia, or complete abstinence from food or drink for long periods of time, without harm; infused knowledge, or the supernormal ability to gain wisdom without studying; incorruption, the absence of the normal decay of the body after death; discernment of spirits, which in the Catholic context means interacting and knowing the difference between angels and demons; and luminous irradiance, a glowing light surrounding the heads, faces, and sometimes the whole bodies of mystics.

I took a walk through the rows of tombs and vaults that looked like blocks and blocks of dead people living next door to each other in the quietest neighborhood that ever existed. There were mausoleums as big as some of the houses I'd seen in the Garden District. Some were well taken care of, whitewashed, and covered with small offerings. Others had huge marble statues of angels holding flowers. And a few were moldy and decayed with actual bones sticking up through the cracks.

Hello, friend. How I’ve missed Your honest echo I hold so dear. Hello, foe. How I resist Your graceless way of drawing fear. Hello, demon. Glad I’ve found you. The angel takes my breath away. She pretends, while you’re hell-bent on preserving true decay.

The river is rising,” he says. “Now it’s your turn. Wake up and smell that beautiful decay, Forsyth…

Got a ripe one, here,” he began, in his usual tasteless fashion. Whipping off the paper sheet, they were faced with the decomposing body of what had once been a woman. “I can tell you straight away that this lady did not die as Mother Nature intended.” MacKenzie looked up from the waste with a gleam in her eye. “Don’t tease me, Jeff.” The man flushed again. “Ah, um. Well. As you can see, she’s decaying rapidly which can make it difficult to pick up on nuances, but there is one little thing,” he said, gesturing for them to move closer to the body. “Just here, on her neck.

if a man wasn’t killed in war, then that man’s mind, spirit, and emotions decayed, or, even worse, were willfully buried because of it.

I used to think this was all about good and evil,” said Rickett, “but it’s not.” “No?” “There’s a kind of evil that isn’t even in opposition to good, because good is an irrelevance to it. It’s a foulness that’s right at the heart of existence, born with the stuff of the universe. It’s in the decay to which all things tend. It is, and it always will be, but in dying we leave it behind.” “And while we’re alive?” “We set our souls against it, and our saints and angels, too.” He patted Parker on the shoulder. “Especially the destroying ones.

Through the rose garden, the path ran straight ahead to the mass of mauve wisteria, now past its best. At ground level, Ellie could see now that it formed a tunnel leading deeper into the garden, gnarled trunks growing over a long wooden frame that was rotten in places. At the end was a green space the size of a large room, walled by a hedge of clipped myrtle. From all sides white trumpets of datura hung down, smelling faintly of coffee. "I've never seen such a display," said Ellie. "My mother planted them many years ago. Moonflowers." "Also known as devil's trumpet." "Angel's trumpet, too. Or so she told me.

The idea that the struggle between nations is part of an evolutionary law of man's advance involves a profound misreading of the biological analogy. The warlike nations do not inherit the earth; the represent the decaying human element.

Some people let themselves die when their time came. Some grappled to a reasonable facsimile of life, sustained by insurance contracts, phylacteric trusts, and premortem exercises. Others were Vogel. He just died, decayed, and stuck around.

I need you, Cockroach. I need you, but you pull the breath from my lungs and leave me a disordered mess. And now that I’ve felt the terrifying experience of loving you, I would never have it any other way. I could never go back to my life before you. And none of this is worth anything without you, either. I’d carry on, because I feel like I owe it to the humans and the angels to shoulder my responsibility, but without you I would have no joy in my life. Without you, I would rot. I would decay and die.

The grave was over grown now. Once there would have always been the vivid smells and colours of fresh flowers and the corridors of the cemetery would have echoed with the sounds of tears and heartache; once this child and his death had been the focal point for generations of lives, had shaped the fate and fortune of countless people, and traumatised the entire village. Now there was only Sergio, and the once flawless statue of an angel, now stained and weathered, green moss growing across half his face. Sergio smiled and patted the statue’s head. ‘Ahhh. My little boy,’ he said, smiling wistfully. ‘I remember you when there was not a mark on you. It’s a shame we all have to get old… Even statues of angels…