Quotes About Tragedy

For some days, people thought that India was shaking. But there are always tremors when a great tree falls.

When a big tree falls, the ground shakes

My mother, she killed me, My father, he ate me, My sister Marlene, Gathered all my bones, Tied them in a silken scarf, Laid them beneath the juniper tree, Tweet, tweet, what a beautiful bird am I.

Christians can trust God to redeem even the greatest of tragedies and the most desperate of situations.

Whether we knew many who died on September 11 or personally knew none, we all lost something on that day. Innocence. Security. A trust that our homeland would always be safe.

I trust people too much, and the other tragedy is I can't say no.

If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.

I've always been drawn to Marilyn Monroe, but certain aspects of her story may be too sad to tell.

Her Leo, so bright, so beautiful. And in the end, so catastrophically flawed.

The man should be dead. He had been beheaded years ago, hadn't he? She wiped the rain from her eyes. But he was still there, the murderer of her child. He was still there.

Somehow he couldn't believe that this was it, that their story would end with such wretchedness, as if Hansel and Gretel had become the witch's dinner after all, or Sleeping Beauty's prince a pile of gnawed bones in the Enchanted Forest.

Botched abortions are the largest single cause of death of pregnant women in the United States, particularly among nonwhite women. In 1964, the president of the New York County Medical Society, Dr. Carl Goldmark, estimated that 80 percent of the deaths of gravid women in Manhattan were from this cause.

The sweetness that all longed for night and day. Some tragedy might be idly guessed at--loss or illness. She had the luminosity of those about to die.

The doctors said it was something called commotio cordis, a direct blow to the heart between beats. It was instant, a fluke, and deadly.

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tradegy for the poor.

Life is a dream for the wise,a game for the fool,a comedy for the rich,a tragedy for the poor

If you have no tragedy, you have no comedy. Crying and laughing are the same emotion. If you laugh too hard, you cry. And vice versa.

Suicide in the trenches: I knew a simple soldier boy Who grinned at life in empty joy, Slept soundly through the lonesome dark, And whistled early with the lark. In winter trenches, cowed and glum With crumps and lice and lack of rum, He put a bullet through his brain. No one spoke of him again. * * * * * You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go." "The War Poems

I died in hell. They called it Passchendaele.

When Dick was killed last week he looked like that, Flapping along the fire-step like a fish, After the blazing crump had knocked him flat…. "How many dead? As many as ever you wish. Don't count 'em; they're too many. Who'll buy my nice fresh corpses, two a penny?

To him, as to me, the War was inevitable and justifiable. Courage remained a virtue. And that exploitation of courage, if I may be allowed to say a thing so obvious, was the essential tragedy of the War, which, as everyone now agrees, was a crime against humanity.

The depressed person…sees a big discrepancy between what he aspired to in terms of human relations and life goals and what he can achieve in this meager reality. He cannot solve the conflict. What is available is not acceptable to him, and what would be acceptable he cannot grasp. He experiences the tragic situation of having no choice.

The great irony of the Boudreau story is that the formal judicial system constantly scolded the accused for 'taking the law into their own hands' without ever recognizing that the accused had repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to persuade the authorities to deal with Phillip. The root causes of the tragedy include a systemic failure of the legal system itself.