Quotes About Tragedy

I live in a place of tears.

Orestes beloved. as you die you destroy me. You have torn away the part of my mind where hope was .

This is Electra. Brilliant no more.

heaviest of all woe Is theirs whose life is crushed beyond recall.

What woe is lacking to my tale of woes?

Electra, grieving for death, for her father, as a nightingale grieving always.

I have seen or heard of no other man whom destiny treated with such enmity as it did Philoktetes

None but a fool or an infant could forget a father gone so far and cold. No. Lament is a pattern cut and fitted around my mind—like the bird who calls Itys! Itys! endlessly, bird of grief, angel of Zeus. O heartdragging Niobe, I count you a god: buried in rock yet always you weep.

Mad are thy subjects all, and even the wisest heart Straight to folly will fall, at a touch of thy poisoned dart.

it reels under a wild storm of blood, wave after wave battering Thebes.

Look and learn all citizens of Thebes. This is Oedipus. He, who read the famous riddle, and we hailed chief of men, All envied his power, glory, and good fortune. Now upon his head the sea of disaster crashes down. Mortality is man's burden. Keep your eyes fixed on your last day. Call no man happy until he reaches it, and finds rest from suffering.

Alas for the seed of man.

And the dead man will hate thee too, with cause. Say I am mad and give my madness rein To wreck itself; the worst that can befall Is but to die an honorable death.

OEDIPUS: O, O, O, they will all come, all come out clearly! Light of the sun, let me look upon you no more after today! I who first saw the light bred of a match accursed, and accursed in my living with them I lived with, cursed in my killing.

you brought my sperm rising back, springing to light fathers, brothers, sons—one murderous breed— brides, wives, mothers.

I haven't come to mock you, Oedipus, or to criticize your former failings.

Mother and father marked out that rock to be my everlasting tomb—buried alive. Let me die there, where they tried to kill me.

Oed. Must I not fear my mother's marriage-bed?

your own father's hands that served his once bright eyes so well— that made them blind.

No pity for these things, there is no pity but mine, oh father, for the pity of your butchering rawblood death.

That all our gathered spoil was reaved and slaughtered, Flocks, herds, and herdmen, by some human hand

raging plague in all its vengeance, devastating the house of Cadmus!

Never since that time has this house got itself clear of rawblood butchery.

Laius was killed, they say, by certain travelers.