From Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston

"There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes."

Dust Tracks on a Road, by Zora Neale Hurston

From Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

"Material things are so vulnerable to the humiliations of decay."
--Gilead, Marilynne Robinson