Quotes About Tragedy

What keeps me up at night is our nation's continued and burgeoning lack of rationality in response to mass shootings.

Real people speak in my books about the main events of the age, such as the war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire.

There's nothing funny about violence. Death is a real thing.

Life is precious, and when someone dies it's an opportunity to realise how precious it is. My brother drowned when I was 17. He was 15. I think I grew from that. My father didn't. It really crushed him.

My dad died when he was 60. I was only 17 and I think, psychologically, that had a huge impact on me, probably more than I realised.

'The Diary of Anne Frank' gets pretty dark toward the end. But there are some comic moments in the early part of the play. Anne was a goofball at times.

There will always been the prurient rubbernecking aspect to disasters: people who just can't get enough gore.

I'm a tragedienne in some way. I think quite epically. I like epic landscapes and grand emotions.

My grandmother died in childbirth, and my great-aunt lived with us. She had bound feet. She never knew how to read or write.

As a father I can't imagine the pain of digging my own child's grave.

One of my favourite books of all time: 'The Great Gatsby'. I just think it's so well written.

The thing with Berry and Duane and the rest of us in the original Allman Brothers seemed to be a once-in-a-lifetime thing. When Duane was killed, we knew we lost a great part of that, but we still managed to play some great music.

It's just sad to see what happened to Nipsey when he was doing all these great things for the community. Hopefully, everybody in different communities can learn from that and realize you don't want to take away the people that are doing great things for you, in your community.

I think 'Manchester' is really about grieving and trying to get on after something terrible has happened to an adult, and a whole life being destroyed, and then, what are the forces that keep him involved with the people he loves? They love him, and they won't let him go.

If you're guilty of something, you can focus on that, but if something terrible happens, and you can't imagine how you could have changed it, that's very difficult for the mind. In some ways, it's more difficult not to be at fault because it's a subtler thing.

I made 'Bowling for Columbine' in the hope the school shootings would stop and that we would address the issue of how easy it is to get a gun in the United States, and tragically, those school shootings continue.

If you really want to kill yourself, you get a gun and blow your head off.

I come from a family that has been here for almost 200 years. My ancestors started a very dangerous gunpowder business in 1802, and my great- grandfather and his father were both killed in gunpowder explosions.

Haiti looks like a bomb hit it.

My mother had had six children in five and a half years, and three of them died in that time.

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.

Richard III is not likeable. Macbeth is not likeable. Hamlet is not likeable. And yet you can't take your eyes off them. I'm far more interested in that than I am in any sort of likeability.

'Hamlet' is the most famous play in the world for a reason. The journey you go on is incredible.

'Hamlet' is a play of many strange parts, with ghosts and players, politicians and clowns.