Quotes About Tragedy

Debe ser la caricia de lo inútil, la tristeza sin fin de ser poeta, de cantar y cantar, sin que se rompa la tragedia sin par de la existencia. It must be the caress of the useless, the endless sadness of being a poet, of singing and singing, without breaking the peerless tragedy of existence. (From Canción Amarga/Bitter Song)

Americans refused to see accidents as accidental. They did not comprehend they while tragedy always exacts a formidable price, it rarely incurs a debt.

Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.

History was repeating itself: the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy.

Music — good music, great music — had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses' ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something.

Tragedies in hindsight look like farces.

And does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce?No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.

Opera cuts to the chase—as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.

Sabía ya que sólo las viejas palabras servían: muerte, congoja, tristeza, pesar, sufrimiento. Nada moderadamente evasivo o medicinal. La aflicción es un estado humano, no médico, y aunque haya píldoras que nos ayuden a olvidarla - y todo lo demás -, no hay pastillas que la curen. Los afligidos no están deprimidos, sino solo debidamente, adecuada, matemáticamente tristes.

He remembered, at school, being guided by masters through books and plays in which there was often a Conflict between Love and Duty. In those old stories, innocent but passionate love would run up against the duty owed to family, church, king, state. Some protagonists won, some lost, some did both at the same time; usually, tragedy ensued. No doubt in religious, patriarchal, hierarchical societies, such conflicts continued and still gave themes to writers.

and the sad demise of my father before I saw the light of day. Ulf was

He'd lost his temper with Erisa once too often, and look what had happened. The stupid woman had tried to run from him, and when she fell she'd killed his son as well as herself.

A night passed while Cixi dealt with one matter after another, conscious all the time that she just murdered her adopted son. She was forced to stop working at about eleven o'clock in the morning as death was imminent. She died less than three hours later.

Por otro lado, los criminales producen, según la circunstancia, impresiones morales o trágicas, cultivando así el sentido estético del pueblo. De esta manera, los criminales ofrecen tanto diversiones como actividades artísticas en una sociedad cada vez más monótona.

Auschwitz was a dark epiphany, providing us with a terrible vision of what life is like when all sense of the sacred is lost and the human being--whoever he or she may be--is no longer revered as an inviolable mystery.

Aristotle's account of the Katharsis of tragedy was a philosophic presentation of a truth that Homo religiosus had always understood intuitively: a symbolic, mythical or ritual presentation of events that would be unendurable in daily life can redeem and transform them into something pure and even pleasurable.

Our neocortex has made us meaning-seeking creatures, acutely aware of the perplexity and tragedy of our predicament, and if we do not discover some ultimate significance in our lives, we fall easily into despair.

I turned to the animal world from the world of men; my heart was heavy with the tragedy of the night.

To die for the one you loved was an effort too sweet for words.

Billie Jo threw the pail, they said. An accident, they said.

Billie Jo's father brought in a pail of kerosene put it next to the stove, Billie Jo's ma thought it was water so she used it and ending up catching the pail on fire ma went to get pa and Billie Jo thought she was doing a good thing by getting rid of the pail that was on fire not knowing her mom was coming back into the house and caught her mom on fire and Billie Jo put out the flames on her mom with her hands.

Do unto others' is an unnatural, inhuman behavior. You can understand why so many churches and churchgoers say it but so few achieve it. It goes against something fundamental in our natures. And this, then, is the human tragedy—that the common humanity we share is fundamentally based on the denial of a common shared humanity.

Grief had destroyed Rosalie's parents. It seemed that God had reached down and scooped out the middle of the family as casually as if he were eating a watermelon.

When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book. Both