Quotes About Tragedy

Opportunistic theft and burglary are, historically, rare in American disasters, rare enough that many disaster scholars consider it one of the "myths" of disaster. Some such opportunism happened in Katrina. The first thing worth saying about such theft is who cares if electronics are moving around without benefit of purchase when children's corpses are floating in filthy water and stranded grandmothers are dying of heat and dehydration?

Something wonderful happens to you and you instantly look back over your life and see it as a series of fortunate events stretching off into the distance like mountain peaks. Something terrible happens and your life has always been a litany of woe. The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

About three women a day are murdered by spouses or ex-spouses in this country.

And for anyone about to argue that workplace sexual intimidation isn't a life-or-death issue, remember that Marine Lance Corporal Maria Lauterbach, age twenty, was apparently killed by her higher-ranking colleague one winter's night while she was waiting to testify that he raped her. The burned remains of her pregnant body were found in the fire pit in his backyard.

About three women a day are murdered by spouses or ex-spouses in this country. It's one of the main causes of death for pregnant women in the United States.

She was dead even before she was a corpse.

Told from the man's point of view, Vertigo is awash with romantic fog, but from the woman's perspective, it's about being forced to disappear— not from the top of a tower, but in everyday life as two successive lovers make her into someone else for their own ends, a common enough tragedy.

Allowed to cast themselves for great tragic roles, they were experiencing the exhilaration felt by great tragic actors. It was not lack of control, lack of taste, lack of knowledge that accounted for permission of what was not permitted in the West. Rather was it the reverse. Our people could not have handled patients full of the dangerous thoughts of death and love; these people had such resources that they did not need to empty their patients of such freight.

Perché mai la vita moderna ha generato orrori al cui confronto le vecchie tragedie sembrano spettacoli per bambini? Forse perché l'umanità in cerca di avventura ha cambiato troppo il mondo esterno che genera la vita.

Aun la desgracia, para que pueda ser verdaderamente desgracia, tiene que contar con un instante de consuelo; de no ser así, ni siquiera tendría sentido como desgracia.

Croz je mrtev, Carrel zlomený a Taugwalder byl zdiskreditován. A to vÅ¡echno jen proto, že Whymper umí lépe zacházet se slovy než s cepínem.

jede freie Entscheidung als Fehlentscheidung herausstellen kann, bei Grenzgängen oft mit tragischen Folgen.

Remarque Erich Maria

She thinks how sad it is that we remember the killers and not their victims. What if the world forgot Hitler and remembered all the names of his victims? What is we immortalized the victims?

A la mañana siguiente, cuando los romanos llegaron triunfantes a lo alto de la hasta entonces inexpugnable fortaleza de Masada, todo lo que hallaron fue una calma espectral: novecientos sesenta hombres, mujeres y niños muertos. La guerra, finalmente, había acabado.

Pienso, luego existo. De acuerdo, pero no tenía un centavo. Todas las otras pérdidas tenían un sentido trágico, una cualidad, digamos así, simbólica: la lengua natal, la patria, los amigos. Pero ¿y el dinero? Sin dinero ¿Cómo iba a hacer, no ya para pensar sino, más directamente, para existir?

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

History will not absolve us if we do not, once and for all, reveal all that is known about the greatest, most tragic murder mystery in American History. After all, 90 percent of the American people believe that there was a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy.

He died on his return to New York. He died on the gangplank, just a few feet away from America. He didn't quite make it. His hat did though. It rolled off his head and down the gang-plank and landed, plop, on America. Poor devil. I heard it was his heart, but the way the Chinese dentist described the business, it could have been his teeth.

At the age of three and a half the Taung Child was eaten by an eagle. The evidence is that damage marks to the eye sockets of the fossil are identical to marks made by modern eagles on modern monkeys as they rip out their eyes. Poor little Taung Child, shrieking on the wind as you were borne aloft by the aquiline fury, you would have found no comfort in your destined fame, two and a half million years on, as the type specimen of Australopithecus africanus.

They found him late that night. He was floating head-down in the benjo, the long, deep trench of rain-churned shit that served as the communal toilet. Somehow he had dragged himself there from the hospital, where they had carried his broken body when the beating had finally ended. It was presumed that, on squatting, he had lost his balance and toppled in. With no strength to pull himself out, he had drowned.

He had forgotten the sharp taste of stone dust that hung around the broken village houses, the dead skinny donkeys' smell and the dead wretched goats' smell, the broken terraces' smell and smashed olive groves' smell, the sour stench of high explosive, the heavy odour of spilled olive oil, all melding into a single smell he came to associate with human beings in trouble.

the tormented, hopeless feeling of two people who lived together in a love not yet love, nor yet not; an unshared life shared; a conspiracy of affections, illnesses, tragedies, jokes and labour; a marriage—the strange, terrible neverendingness of human beings. A family.

It was on such a night as this that the unhappy things came about.