Quotes About Tragedy

Istared at George's body.

You could fill an airlift to Africa with all the food generated by one dead Jew.

It's only a heartache. It isn't a tragedy. A tragedy would be losing the father of my children to cancer. This I wrestle with the hardest. There are thirty-one flavors of pain, like Baskin Robbins in hell. Am I allowed to feel pain at a breakup? When there is so much other shit going on in this world? Love is extremely serious. I don't think this is trivial.

Le malheur émousse le sens du ridicule

El 30 de julio de 1811 murió ejecutado

La tristeza fascinante del lugar parece acentuarse con la visión de esas escuadras de pájaros sonámbulos, en pleno día, es como si el vacío se anudara con la honda tristeza, y ésta de vez en cuando cobrara voz con el chillido de alguna gaviota.

The Holocaust put an end to an age in which, to use the words of Eric Hobsbawm, Jews underwent an explosion of creativity, like boiling water lifting the lid of a saucepan.82 But the end of pariah Judaism also meant the end of the stage in the history of critical thought in the Western world.

On the eve of the Second World War, almost ten million Jews had lived in Europe; by the mid 1990s less than two million remained.3 After the war, Jewry practically ceased to exist in Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Germany and Austria, the countries that had been its main centres.

Six out of eight members of the first politburo of the Bolshevik Party created in November 1917 – Lev Kamenev, Nikolay Krestinsky, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Andrei Bubnov, and Grigori Sokolnikov – were killed by Stalin between 1936 and 1941; only Lenin and Stalin himself died natural deaths.

They picked up all of the Jews from our very small town. They froze to death in the railway cars. You could see that? My father was standing watch there. They unloaded them afterward as corpses.

Poles and Russians had been detained in Auschwitz before it became a death camp for Jews,

She was trying to free her mother, who had recently been deported to Auschwitz. The lawyer responded bluntly, "You can file a petition, but you will not see your mother again. Auschwitz is an extermination camp." When she received notification of her mother's death a few months later—"died of sepsis and phlegm in Auschwitz"—she considered this plausible. "Later, I found out that it was just one of many death notices issued on that day.

He was a proud young man who had been called up into the SS, and he was in a concentration camp. The young man simply didn't go along, and he was shot as an SS man. And that was also known to us in our town.

Among Jews who had not emigrated, only a few had somehow managed to avoid incarceration. Most often these were either Jews in mixed marriages or the children of mixed marriages. A few others had gone into hiding, but the rest were all deported to concentration camps and ghettos.

Many of the Jewish survey respondents, however, first became aware of the Holocaust when they themselves became caught up in it and had not known about it before they were deported to the concentration camps and ghettos in eastern Europe.

People know your tragedies and they treat you like you're not human. Like you're a three-headed goat. A monster from some other planet. They keep reminding you of your pain. You see how they look at me? They're stuck on that person I used to be. They can't see that old life as just a moment in time that I've moved on from. It was a horrible life.

The dead bodies were so visible that almost no one could see what had happened to them.

What can you say about a twenty-five year old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. The Beatles. And me.

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.

What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?

What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.

If you have ever been in a real tragic or sad situation, the words that come out are hopelessly inadequate and kind of cliched.

Fireheart] was interrupted by a screech from Cloudtail. "Fireheart! Fireheart, Brightpaw isn't dead!" Fireheart spun around and raced across the clearing to crouch beside Brightpaw. Her white-and-ginger fur, which, she had always kept so neatly groomed, was spiky with drying blood. On one side of her face the fur was torn away, and there was blood where her eye should have been. One ear had been shredded, and there were huge claw marks scored across her muzzle.

You've killed me." The apprentice gasped mockingly, and rolled feebly onto his back.