Quotes About Tragedy

When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, 'Why god? Why me?' and the thundering voice of God answered, 'There's just something about you that pisses me off.'

Why do we laugh at such terrible things? Because comedy is often the sarcastic realization of inescapable tragedy.

It's a fantastic mirror to us to engage with art, to engage with paintings that are about tragedy, to go see Shakespearean comedies, to read a Greek play... We have always investigated the lightness and darkness of the human soul, in all these forms. So why not do it on television?

Nothing I did contributed to me having cancer, so I can't sit back and say, 'Oh why me.' Why not me? Why does tragedy always have to hit someone else?

The constituents of tragedy may be universally acknowledged, easily invoked and deeply felt, but the elements of comedy are, I think, more widely variable from person to person.

The spread of HIV through contaminated blood was a tragic illustration of the risk that blood products could harbor undetectable and latent infection that's only revealed once it's widely distributed.

Anyone who was alive during the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the 14th century experienced something terrifyingly close to the widespread death and chaos of an apocalyptic event.

I have a very interesting story to tell, and people always want to hear about it. They know I'm a 9/11 widow, and I always get comments on that and being an actor and raising my daughters by myself.

There is a great overlap of tragedy that played out through the generations of the Lincolns. That, coupled with the idea that many people consider Lincoln our greatest president ever and the fact that he was also a man assassinated at the age of 56 and had a widow with mental problems is what makes it all so fascinating.

My charity is in the business of helping firefighters in any way that we can. For instance, after 9/11 we were the second-fastest charity to raise and distribute money to the widows and surviving family members of the 343 firefighters who died that day.

I'm not devastated over a baseball game. If somebody came to me and said, 'Your wife is terminally ill.' Or, if my kids and wife get on a plane and I got a call that said, 'Something happened with the plane,' that's devastating.

I had a friend, Melissa, who was 28 years old. She was my best friend's wife, and she was my wife's best friend. She died of breast cancer. When she passed away back in 2004 was the last time I cried.

I lost two brothers in an airplane crash, both of them leaving a wife and kids. When I get to Heaven, that's probably the first question I'd like to ask: 'Why was it necessary?'

The abrupt and sudden death of my wife has taken a severe emotional and psychic toll on me. On top of that, some people have stooped so low that they have tried to use my personal tragedy for their personal benefit.

The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out.

I found my grandmother dead. It shook me up. I got up to make her breakfast, and I knew it was strange that she wasn't stirring. I went in to wake her, and she was laying in rigor mortis, and I'm done. I called next door, and the kid picked up the phone, and I was so wild, he dropped it.

It was an extremely overdramatic play called 'Wild Decembers'. It was all about the Brontes, and they all, one after the other, died of tuberculosis. I remember taking every opportunity to cough over other people's lines.

The second stage set in ten or fifteen days after the bombing. Its first symptom was falling hair. Diarrhea and fever, which in some cases went as high as 106, came next.

Losing my father at a tender age was extremely important in being able to accept what happened to me later when I became a quadriplegic.

Comedy tends to come out of things which are quite painful and serious.

On that terrible day, a nation became a neighborhood. All Americans became New Yorkers.

There is something great and terrible about suicide.

It's a positive thing to talk about terrible things and make people laugh about them.

The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.