Quotes About Tragedy

Tragedy sort of works this way: Once it snakes it's way in, it cuts down all your defenses and allows it's brethren easy access to feed.

Here is the truth about tragedy: It's good for the soul.

Broome introduced Flynn to Erin. Erin nodded and then put her head back down. Erin had never been good with the families of victims. "They're broken," Erin had told him before. Broome looked now into Flynn's eyes and thought "shattered" was more accurate. "Broken" suggested something clean and all the way through and fixable. But what happened to them was messier, more abstract, filled with shards and no hope of recovery.

They stood there, the two of them—the mother of a dead boy holding firm to the boy who had killed him.

To see an almost certain horrible death--you know how crowds all sit at the edge of their seats, /praying/ subconsciously for a spectacular accident--and then to be whisked away from it so suddenly--brought to the edge of tragedy, and then to have their better natures win out, showing them how much nicer they always /knew/ they were--that was the supreme thrill.

Shakespeare will not allow Falstaff to die upon stage. We see and hear the deaths of Hamlet, Cleopatra, Antony, Othello, and Lear. Iago is led away to die silently under torture. Macbeth dies offstage but he goes down fighting. Falstaff dies singing the Twenty-third Psalm, smiling upon his fingertips, playing with flowers, and crying aloud to God three or four times. That sounds more like pain than prayer. We do not want Sir John Falstaff to die. And of course he does not. He is life itself.

The tragic sense of life in Don Quixote is also the faith of Moby Dick. Ahab is a monomaniac; so is the kindlier Quixote, but both are tormented idealists who seek justice in human terms, not as theocentric men but as ungodly, godlike men.

King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.

No one dies halfway through the last act. – Heinrich Ibsen

War is a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead. —ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Smith recalls: "Within a span of perhaps twenty minutes everyone around me was dead or wounded, except me.

Still, their affection for each other remained strong: while Baker was serving in Washington, the Lincolns honored him by naming their second-born son for the congressman. (Edward Baker Lincoln died tragically at age three in 1850.) When Baker finished his term, he dutifully handed off his House seat to Lincoln.

British baby farmer Amelia Dyer, believed to have murdered several hundred infants in her care.[1

She held him spellbound," he went on, then let out a ragged breath. "So he went to his death."[

publicly raped by a specially trained giraffe, after which she was torn apart by wild animals.

Asked at one point why he had slain so many of his neighbors, Unruh replied: "I'd have killed a thousand if I'd had bullets enough."[55]

They said if he'd had two good arms he'd have made it, he was moving that fast. Seventeen bullet holes in him. They didn't have to shoot him that much.

Seventeen bullet holes in him.

He likened Tom's death to the senseless slaughter of songbirds by hunters and children

Tom [Robinson] era morto nell'attimo stesso in cui Mayella Ewell aveva aperto la bocca e urlato.

A medida que avanzaba el verano nuestro juego progresaba. Añadimos diálogos y perfeccionamos la trama hasta que compusimos una pequeña obra teatral en la que introducíamos cambios todos los días. (...) Habíamos compuesto una obra breve y triste, tejida con trozos y retales de habladurías y leyendas de la vecindad.

The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. ... [But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.

People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.

It seems to me that very sad things always contain an element of the comical