Quotes About Tragedy

During the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, winds were past 200 miles per house and people caught outside were sandblasted to death. Rescue workers found nothing but their shoes and belt buckles… In 1938, the hurricane put downtown Providence, Rhode Island, under 10 feet of ocean. The waves generated by that storm were so huge that they literally shook the earth; seismographs in Alaska picked up their impact 5,000 miles away.

The much-discussed estimate of twenty-two vets a day committing suicide in the United States is deceptive: it was only in 2008 that - for the first time in decades- the suicide rate among veterans surpassed the civilian rate in America, and though each death is enormously tragic, the majority of those veterans were over the age of fifty. Many were Vietnam vets and, generally speaking, the more time that passes after a trauma, the less likely a suicide is to have anything to do with it.

Starting in the early 1980s, the frequency of rampage shootings in the United States began to rise more and more rapidly until it doubled around 2006. Rampages are usually defined as attacks where people are randomly targeted and four or more are killed in one place, usually shot to death by a lone gunman.

The men could only look at each other through the falling snow, from land to sea, from sea to land, and realize how unimportant they all were. —SHIP ON THE ROCKS, NEWBURYPORT, MASSACHUSETTS, 1839, NO SURVIVORS. (SIDNEY PERLEY, Historic Storms of New England, 1891)

JÅ«tar? si chiese perché Sayama e Otoki avessero deciso di morire proprio lì. Avrebbero potuto trovare un posto migliore. Due innamorati prossimi al suicidio dovrebbero scegliere con cura il luogo in cui morire. Vicino a una fonte termale, per esempio, o in una località rinomata per la sua bellezza. Certo, anche lì la vista era bella, ma perché proprio su quelle rocce dure e non su un morbido prato?

The tragic history of Spanish America was ready to be written . . . in blood.

He kills her in her own humor.

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?

What are you doing sister? / Killing swine.

I remember thinking that the Germans must have had a very fine view of all the neighborhoods they were obliterating.

My father and brother were slain at Sandal Castle because they engaged a far superior force. It was daring, heroic, foolhardy…and fatal. I'll not make the same mistake.

To call it a "setback" is like calling the Expulsion from Eden a minor misunderstanding.

Yesterday I heard some of the castle servants talking about a funeral for one of the stable lads. He went skating last week on the pond in the village, but the ice was not thick enough and he drowned. I like to skate on the ice,too, Papa, have my own pair of bone skates. I could drown crossing the Channel as Uncle Robert fears... or I could drown back in Angers, if I was unlucky like that stable lad. Geoffrey's mouth twitched. God help me, he said, I've sired a lawyer!

Simon said nothing, thinking of all the good men who'd died because this inept, faithless fool had been born a King's son.

All of us sing more from sorrow than from joy. It is tragedy that leaves a mark on the mind and calls for the tribute of a song. Happiness is its own gift, and needs no other. The Songcatchers

the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

He could do little. Brandy might help, he thought, but when he poured some into the hurt man's mouth it ran back out again. Presently a colonel, Johnston's chief of staff, came hurrying into the ravine. But he could do nothing either. He knelt down facing the general. "Johnston, do you know me? Johnston, do you know me?" he kept asking, over and over, nudging the general's shoulder as he spoke. But Johnston did not know him. Johnston was dead.

He was always on hand for misfortune, among the first to arrive when tragedy struck, and for this reason was known as Light Hearse Harry.

He had gone home from his office the previous morning to find her dead, lying on the hillside below their deck.

Bofusdiaga says past wrongs cannot be righted because past wrongs are past and time only runs one way. Bofusdiaga says all you independent creatures suffer great wrongs sometime in the past, which is normal, but you stay always living in the past so you can continue wronged forever! Forever miserable, forever tragical! Bofusdiaga says so long as you go chewing yesterday's pains, you cannot eat today's pleasures, so it is no help!

So I heard the boom of my father's rifle when he shot my best friend. A bullet only costs about two cents, and anybody can afford that.

Did you know that you can be killed by a benign tumor? Imagine that news headline: Native American poet killed by oxymoron.

No, Miss Warren said. Your sister, she's dead

But my grandmother wanted us to forgive her murderer.