Quotes About Tragedy

Love's the son stood stammering elocution while the poor ship in flames went down

How the little courtesies of life on the surface of society, deemed so important from man towards woman, fade into utter insignificance in view of the deeper tragedies in which she must play her part alone, where no human aid is possible.

Yes—what the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.

When the flaming pieces descended, those that fell on other buildings set them aflame also, so that the whole surrounding area soon resembled a suburb of hell,

In 1942, somebody came back to our village from Treblinka. His name was Spivak, he escaped by hiding in a wagon full of clothing. He described what was going on there, and said he got crazy from what he had seen. We didn't believe him, we didn't believe in the crematoria. We thought he was a madman telling an unbelievable tale. How could such a thing be happening in our world, our modern world?

The tragic capacity of the human race for going off course was a little balanced by the integrity of the animals who were always obedient to the law of their being. We were meant to love like that, thought Mary, simply because that's our law and we were told to obey it.

And so on that stormy autumn evening Sophie Le Patourel took the lives of William and Marianne and Marguerite and knotted them together forever.

People have suggested that I have survivor's guilt. I reject that. We all should be alive. What I have is profound sadness and anger that some worthless dirtbag can come along and take away a family's bright and shining light, leaving a gaping hole that is never to be filled.

Occasionally, a truck rumbled by, loaded down with logs. The butterflies couldn't scatter fast enough, so the road was littered with severed wings.

As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.

Lighter things will happen to you, birds will steal your husband's sandwich on the beach, and your child will still be dead, and your husband's shock will still be funny.

This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending.

Too late, too late, juice pouring does not a kind soul make, and I killed you.

Caligula, trapped leaving the games, was run through by noblemen who then hacked at his genitals and in their ferocity may even, according to Cassius Dio, have gorged themselves on his flesh. His wife, one of the few people Caligula loved, was murdered on the spot and his infant daughter, so a narrative of chilling verisimilitude relates, was picked up by the feet and had her brains dashed out against a wall.

it was an unspeakably awful thing. And I had not known. This is the way of life: the many things we do not know until it is too late.

The most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.

in tragic situations, children often coped better than adults. Possibly, she thought, it was because children's thinking was less complicated and more honest; or perhaps children became mentally adult when the need was thrust upon them.

The more the history of the World War and what led up to it is studied, the more clearly those tragic years become revealed as a vast collapse of civilization.

Fifty-five thousand casualties for five hundred yards' gain on the Champagne front in February 1915; 60,000 lost again that spring at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel; 120,000 in May at Arras. The next year brought the slaughter at Verdun stretching from February to June, with 315,000 total French casualties. Then came the French support for the British offensive along the Somme from July to November, in which another 200,000 were killed or wounded—all for little significant gain.

This then was English fiction, this was English criticism, and farce, after all, was but an ill-played tragedy.

She had poisoned herself - in time.

The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.

I think the tragic feeling is invoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing -- his sense of personal dignity.

All of this vain heartbreak that we cling to as important or tragic would one day be revealed - by TV scientists - for what it is: just behavior.