Quotes About Tragedy

The "gift" of tragedy is not destruction, but humility

Surely the greatest tragedy for men in regard to the feminine principle is that their fear alienates them from their own anima, the principle of relatedness, feeling and connection to the life force. This alienation from self obliges alienation from other men as well. Often their only connection with each other comes through superficial talk about outer events, such as sports and politics.

History has shown repeatedly that any obsession with the demonic will always lead to tragedy.

If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain silent while a stranger takes up residence inside our skin.

Never try to live decently, boy—not unless you're willing to open your life to tragedy and sadness. Live like a beast, and no event, no matter how harrowing, will ever be able to move you.

The tragedy of a man who has found himself out.

More than twice as many Americans lost their lives in one day at Sharpsburg as fell in combat in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American war combined.

And in the final reckoning, American lives lost in the Civil War exceed the total of those lost in all the other wars the country has fought added together, world wars included.

Pickett's charge represented the Confederate war effort in microcosm: matchless valor, apparent initial success, and ultimate disaster.

A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.

He's a drunk. One of those guys who dies at twenty and is buried at eighty.

the girl.. her name was Shelly...

And between them, the little shoe-box glistening with scarlet wallpaper and gilt like a fairy coffin. Inside it, there was the crabbed corpse of a still-born child wreathed in bloody newspaper. "I hated you so much," she said softly.

Years later, reporters would link together the deaths of many members of the cast and crew of The Conqueror (1955), including Susan, John Wayne, Agnes Moorehead, Pedro Armendariz, and director Dick Powell. All of them eventually developed cancer; the cause seems to have been the radiation that hovered over the Utah filming site in 1955 after government A-bomb tests.

The rise and fall of Tony Montana, and what a way to go out.

The space between the next two buildings was crowded with four torn bodies, limbs shredded from torsos, intestines strewn like party streamers. Suddenly one of the torsos jerked into the darkened alley beyond, dragged by something hidden in shadow.

Drug addicts are so funny that way. Just spinning around, lost in their own little world. Doing so much, accomplishing so little. How sad.

But literature is one of those realms in which man asserts his freedom, his spirit: in literature of a first-rate order, man attains a kind of imaginative freedom in which he asserts, implicitly, that in his spirit, he will not be the slave of fate. He assimilates tragedy, sorrow, and bitterness.

f While Mr. William Bradford was absent in the shallop, his wife Dorothy accidentally fell overboard from the Mayflower at Cape Cod and was drowned.

Twelve years after Robin's death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard that they had known on the day it happened.

People die, sure . . . but it's heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness.

a gunpowder factory exploded at Delft in the 1600s, that the painter had been so haunted and obsessed by the destruction of his city that he painted it over and over.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature

The histories and tragedies of Shakespeare that Lincoln loved most dealt with themes that would resonate to a president in the midst of civil war: political intrigue, the burdens of power, the nature of ambition, the relationship of leaders to those they governed. The plays illuminated with stark beauty the dire consequences of civil strife, the evils wrought by jealousy and disloyalty, the emotions evoked by the death of a child, the sundering of family ties or love of country.