Quotes About Tragedy

The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.

I'm afraid of children my own age. They kill each other. Did it always use to be that way? My uncle says no. Six of my friends have been shot in the last year alone. Ten of them died in car wrecks. I'm afraid of them and they don't like me because I'm afraid. My uncle says his grandfather remembered when children didn't kill each other. But that was a long time ago when they had things different.

She was as rational as you and I, more so perhaps, and we burnt her.

Once the bomb release was yanked, it was finished. Now, a full three seconds, all of the time in history, before the bombs struck, the enemy ships themselves were gone half around the visible world, like bullets in which a savage islander might not believe because they were invisible; yet the heart is suddenly shattered, the body falls in separate motions, and the blood is astonished to be freed on the air; the brain squanders its few precious memories and, puzzled, dies.

What killed them?" Hathaway said simply, "Chicken pox.

All of his books were burned in the Great Fire. That's thirty years ago—2006.

Tiene que haber algo en los libros, cosas que no podemos imaginar, para que una mujer se deje quemar viva. Tiene que haber algo. Uno no muere por nada.

What a tragedy that he thought the precious blood of the Savior was shed simply to make him happy in this life, rather than to make him prepared for the next one.

Don't be too sure,' he continued. "The other day I took up a man who hanged himself on the road. He was a Swede, too.' 'Hanged himself! Why, in God's name?' I cried. He kept on looking out watchfully. 'Who knows? The sun too much for him, or the country perhaps.

while under the unsteady hand of the statesman of Sambir the Trovatore fitfully wept, wailed, and bade good-bye to his Leonore again and again in a mournful round of tearful and endless iteration.

What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.

Mrs. Gould knew the history of the San Tomé mine. Worked in the early days mostly by means of lashes on the backs of slaves, its yield had been paid for in its own weight of human bones. Whole tribes of Indians had perished in the exploitation; and then the mine was abandoned, since with this primitive method it had ceased to make a profitable return, no matter how many corpses were thrown into its maw. Then it became forgotten.

Can't say I saw any road or any upkeep, unless the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole in the forehead, upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles farther on, may be considered as a permanent improvement.

Brutus and Cassius howl in Hell together

It was only after I had finished writing the first part that the whole story revealed itself to me in its tragic character and in the march of its events as unavoidable and sufficiently ample in its outline to give free play to my creative instinct and to the dramatic possibilities of the subject

The last day of the war provided chilling closure. The ending, in its ferocity, bloodiness, and uselessness, contained the entire war in microcosm. The fighting went on for the hollowest of reasons: no one knew how to stop it.

The last deaths of the Great War on the western front occurred at midnight on the twelfth in Hamont, a Belgian town near the Dutch border. Retreating German troops, believing they were the last to leave the city, mined the Hamont railroad station. But one final train filled with German soldiers arrived from Antwerp. The mine went off with a roar that flung railway cars into the air like matchboxes. Hundreds of German soldiers thus died thirteen hours after the armistice went into effect.

Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. and Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father, or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action.

Kraft was a skinny, harmless kid from Pennsylvania who wanted only to be liked, and was destined to be disappointed in even so humble and degrading an ambition. Instead, of being liked, he was dead, a bleeding cinder on the barbarous pile whom nobody had heard in those last precious moments while the plane with one wing plummeted.

I only raped her once," he explained. Yossarian was aghast. "But you killed her, Aarfy! You killed her!" "Oh, I had to do that after I raped her," Aarfy replied in his most condescending manner.

Oly sok boldogtalanság van a világban, t?nÅ'dött, komoran meghajtva fejét a tragikus gondolat elÅ'tt, és Å' mit sem tehet senki boldogtalansága ellen, legkevésbé a saját boldogtalansága ellen.

After all, what is a liver? My father, for example, died of cancer of the liver and was never sick a day in his life up till the moment it killed him. Never felt a twinge of pain. In a way, that was too bad, since I hated my father. Lust for my mother, you know.

Nately's death, in fact, almost killed Yossarian too, for when he broke the news to Nately's whore in Rome she uttered a piercing heartbroken shriek and tried to bat him to death with a potato peeler.

Nately's death, in fact, almost killed Yossarian too, for when he broke the news to Nately's whore in Rome she uttered a piercing heartbroken shriek and tried to stab him to death with a potato peeler.