Quotes About Tragedy

I'm so sorry for people who live in lands where there are no Mayflowers," said Anne. "Diana says perhaps they have something better, but there couldn't be anything better than Mayflowers, could there, Marilla? And Diana says if they don't know what they are like they don't miss them. But I think that is the saddest thing of all. I think it would be tragic, Marilla, not to know what Mayflowers are like and not to miss them

Let God leave us! Let us grow up. Let us walk forward on our own. Because we need the silence of the holy: we need the sacred and equally we need its maddening silence. And in the curious privacy and relief of that silence we can go out into the chaos and commit a thousand acts of minor and gleeful splendor all our own. If it's our tragedy to be left by God, then let it also be our luck.

I'm so sorry.' It was very obvious Mrs Douglas was dead. She was dressed only in her nightgown; her eyes protruded

Jessie had never heard you could inherit madness. She thought madness was something that just happened to people in Shakespeare when the wind got up.

Are you not the one who told me that she had to petition the king to get her husband to sleep with her? Aye,that is the gossip at court, but no one knows what she looks like save the king,and he refuses to discuss it. 'Sides, her husband died on the way home to perform his....er duty. 'Twas probably suicide, Amaury muttered grimly.

But it wasn't until much later that I learned the sad facts of his death or the sadder ones of his life. By then I could be found in the pavement cafés of Sour Bridge, with a set of my own.

It's interesting, Ted," I said, "that whenever something significantly painful happens to you, you rail against God, you rail against what a shitty, terrible world it is. But when something good happens to you, you guess you're lucky. A minor tragedy and it's God's fault. A miraculous blessing and it's a bit lucky. What do you make of that?

Tu, minha Eugénia, é que não as descalçaste nunca; foste aí pela estrada da vida, manquejando da perna e do amor, triste como os enterros pobres, solitária, calada, laboriosa, até que vieste também para esta outra margem... O que eu não sei é se a tua existência era muito necessária ao século. Quem sabe? Talvez um comparsa de menos fizessse patear a tragédia humana.

I do not believe that true optimism can come about except through tragedy.

To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.

Matt, I saw a man with his face blown off and no mouth to scream with, and yet he screamed and could not die. I saw two brothers, and one was in blue and one was in grey, and I will not tell you which one took his saber and ran it through the other. Oh God, it was brother against brother, Cain and Abel all over again. And I was turned into Cain. What would God have to do with a nation where brothers can turn against each other with such brutality?

The Greeks had a word for ultimate self-consciousness which I find illuminating: hubris: pride: pride in the sense of putting oneself in the center of the universe. The strange and terrible thing is that this kind of total self-consciousness invariably ends in self-annihilation. The great tragedians have always understood this, from Sophocles to Shakespeare. We witness it in history in such people as Tiberius, Eva Perón, Hider. I

but I still held my breath waiting for Brünnhilde to rise up out of the pyre at the end. And then, instead of a beautiful maiden emerging from the flames, there rose up a great fat

God doesn't plan the horrors. They happen. But God can come into them.

But to serve any discipline of art, be it to chip a David out of an unwieldy piece of marble, to take oils and put a clown on canvas, to write a drama about a young man who kills his father and marries his mother and suffers for these actions, to hear a melody and set the notes down for a string quartet, is to affirm meaning, despite all the ambiguities and tragedies and misunderstanding which surround us.

But there it was again. His face, handsome, petulant, impatient, the way he was when he didn't get what he wanted. 'Get out of here, Louis,' she said aloud. 'I've nothing to lose now,' Louis said. 'I'll bring you down with me, you'll be sorry you didn't listen to me. I've nothing to lose.' There was a huge truck. The lights of a truck and a terrible shattering of glass and … Then there was nothing.

when Orrin and Maria Brand had been killed in that car accident, leaving him as sole caretaker to his five younger siblings. And when

MacCurdy argued that when a bomb falls, it divides the affected population into three groups. The first group is the people killed. They are the ones for whom the experience of the bombing is—obviously—the most devastating. But as MacCurdy pointed out (perhaps a bit callously), "the morale of the community depends on the reaction of the survivors, so from that point of view, the killed do not matter.

When [Sylvia] Plath committed suicide, the suicide rate for women of her age in England reached a staggering 10 per 100,000. Driven by a tragically high number of deaths by gas poisoning. That is as high as the suicide rate for women in England has ever been. By 1977 when the Natural Gas changeover was complete, the suicide rate for young woman was half that.

Perhaps his tragedy is that he is the only normal writer left on earth -- and it is this that adds to his isolation and so too his so sense of guilt.

It was in Barcelona that Schoenberg composed much of Act II of Moses und Aron. He never required quietness to work—indeed, he preferred to hear people round about him—and it is odd to think that he wrote some of the deeply tragic final scene of Act II at a window overlooking the sunlit city, one ear cocked to the gossip of his wife and Mrs Gerhard chatting in the room behind him, always ready to take part if he felt inclined. The

Rome was not built in a day, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed in a day.

Diligence without intelligence is tragedy, not success.

The greatest of tragedies is a life lived without knowing its purpose. Discover your purpose and life will take on a new meaning.