Quotes About Tragedy

The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic.

Our age reminds one of the dissolution of the Greek city-state: Everything goes on as usual and yet there is no longer anyone who believes in it. The invisible spiritual bond which gives it validity, no longer exists, and so the whole age is at once comic and tragic--tragic because it is perishing, comic because it goes on.

But a sad fatality hung over this young girl. She had been given to seven husbands, all of whom had perished in the bride-chamber.

How can the removal of beauty from a world so lacking in beauty be anything but tragic?

Habiby has been able to see man in unheroic positions. If the core of the tragic world is a moral order corrupted by evil, then the world depicted in this novel is a closed one where two evils have met and where heroism has been born out of the havoc that resulted from their meeting (In her introduction to Habiby's Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist)

Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.

this is our tragedy, she said in his words, our fictions are killing us, but if we didn't have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.

Hey you, long face,' shouted an elderly gent who must have been at least seventy years old, but who was dancing through the flooded, rainy streets, waving a rolled umbrella like a sword. 'Don't you sing those Tragedy Songs round here.

This is how people behave when their dailiness is destroyed, when for a few moments they see, plain and unadorned, one of the great shaping forces of life. Calamity fixes them with her mesmeric eye, and they begin to scoop and paw at the rubble of their days, trying to pluck the memory of the quotidian - a toy, a book, a garment, even a photograph - from the garbage heaps of the irretrievable, of their overwhelming loss.

He stared into the fast-flowing waters and contemplated the tragedy of desire.

But great tragedy is universal

Robert Hughes, Time magazines's art critic, told him on the phone that after he saw the planes flying over SoHo he had walked around in shock. On his way home he had stopped by a bakery and found the shelves cleaned out. Not a loaf remained, not a bagel, and the old baker standing amid the emptiness spread his arms and said, 'Should happen every day.

Guns were alive in America, and death was their random gift.

Her parents were killed in their private helicopter. An elite death but at the moment of dying we are all penniless. She never spoke of it. It would be generous to understand her behavior, willful, remote, abstract, as her way of expressing grief.

Een man hoeft slechts zijn intellectuele tienertijd te bereiken, of hij gaat vermoeden dat het leven geen klucht is; dat het zelfs geen elegant blijspel is; dat het integendeel bloeit en vrucht draagt uit de onpeilbare tragische diepten van wezenlijk gebrek waarin de wortels steken van wie het leeft.

People can delight in the saddest of sob-stuff, as long as they find it beautiful.

just as we cannot write the stories of our own deaths, which is our tragedy, to be stories whose endings can never be known, not even to ourselves, because we are no longer there to know them.

While you were anesthetized to the tragedy of life you were able to survive. When clarity was returned to you, when it was painstakingly restored, it could drive you mad.

The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not "cowards," as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith—perfect faith, as it turns out—and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.

Tres millones de almas podrán morir de hambre o ser asesinadas en el Congo sin apenas reacción por parte de nuestros medios de comunicación. Pero si una princesa muere en un accidente de coche, la cuarta parte de la población de la Tierra cae postrada de dolor. Quizá seamos incapaces de sentir lo que deberíamos sentir para cambiar nuestro mundo.

I remember feeling the jolt of history when the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center. For many of us, that was the moment we understood that things can go terribly wrong in our world—not because life is unfair or moral progress impossible but because we have failed, generation after generation, to abolish the delusions and animosities of our ignorant ancestors.

Misery makes sport to mock itself.

But the real tragedy was that 15 hadn't been colored yet. (telling Gator fans that a fire at Auburn's football dorm had destroyed 20 books

Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.