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Quotes About Tragedy

I have endured what no one on earth has endured before. I kissed the hands of the man who killed my son.
~ Homer
And he, Achilles, will rouse his companion Patroclus, whom shining Hector with his spear will kill in front of Ilion, after Patroclus has destroyed a multitude of other young men, among them my own son, godlike Sarpedon; and enraged at Patroclus dying, godlike Achilles will kill Hector. And from that point, then, without respite, I will effect a retreat from the ships, all the way until that time the Achaeans?70 capture steep Ilion through the designs of Athena.
~ Homer
loathsome Eriphyle — 370 bribed with a golden necklace to lure her lawful husband to his death .
~ Homer
Untimely sent; they on the battle plain Unburied lay, a prey to rav'ning dogs, And carrion birds; but so had Jove decreed
~ Homer
Borneo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Bream
~ Homer
The rage of Achilles—sing it now, goddess, sing through me the deadly rage that caused the Achaeans such grief and hurled down to Hades the souls of so many fighters, leaving their naked flesh to be eaten by dogs and carrion birds, as the will of Zeus was accomplished. Begin at the time when bitter words first divided that king of men, Agamemnon, and godlike Achilles.
~ Homer
Pero aquel que se siente tocado por mi lanza no tarda en expirar. Su esposa se desgarra las mejillas, quedan sus hijos huérfanos y enrojece él la tierra con su sangre, y se corrompe, y hay en torno suyo más aves de rapiña que hembras gemebundas
~ Homero
Writers seek to create order out of the chaos of everyday life, and to extract meaning from both the tragic and the mundane
~ Hope Edelman
It occurred to me some years ago, that the picture of Richard the Third, as drawn by historians, was a character formed by prejudice and invention. I did not take Shakespeare's tragedy for a genuine representation, but I did take the story of that reign for a tragedy of imagination.
~ Horace Walpole
We'll never know. In the summer of 1971, against the advice of his mother, Howard Myers took a vacation to Florida. The combination of the heat and his medical condition combined to give him a massive heart attack which killed him. He was forty-one years old. There
~ Howard L. Myers
In all, Africa may have lost as many as 5o million human beings to death and slavery during the centuries that we call the beginnings of modern civilization.
~ Howard Zinn
Norris met another survivor on board who told him that he had been bringing home a prized dog on the Titanic and had gone to the kennels and released all the dogs a half hour before the ship went under. Norris described to him how when he was swimming away from the sinking liner he had spied the black face of a French bulldog in the water.
~ Hugh Brewster
It was now just after 1:30 a.m. Ten of the Titanic's sixteen regular lifeboats had departed, carrying approximately 330 people—only a fraction of the 2,209 on board. To the passengers still on deck, the downward slope toward the bow was now very apparent. Yet many of them, the first-class men in particular, still believed that the ship would last till morning and that help would arrive
~ Hugh Brewster
In an election speech in 1936, he said: I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen two hundred limping, exhausted men come out of line – the survivors of a regiment of one thousand that went forward forty-eight hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.
~ Hugh Brogan
The tragedy of his last months was a natural expression of the tragedy of Spain, where culture, eloquence and creativity were giving way to militarism, propaganda, and death. Before long, there was even a concentration camp called 'Unamuno' for republican prisoners.15
~ Hugh Thomas
As he left home on 12 July, a hot Sunday of the Madrid summer, Castillo was shot dead by four men with revolvers, who swiftly escaped into the crowded streets.24
~ Hugh Thomas
After a quarter of a mile, Luis Cuenca, a young Galician socialist sitting beside the politician, shot him in the back of his neck. Neither Condés nor anyone else had expected this dénouement.
~ Hugh Thomas
The scene [Bruegel's 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'] is filled with a vast field, and a cow and a farmer plowing. In the left-hand corner is a tiny ocean the size of a palm, and there, I can barely make it out, the two legs of a man who fell headlong into the sea. This is called the Fall of Icarus. Compared to everyday life, the fall of an idealist who flew too high with candle-wax wings is an unremarkable tragedy.
~ Hwang S?k-y?ng
He hit and fatally injured my innocent and unfortunate uncle whose muttered last words in hospital, before his coma became a full stop, were: 'My God, the buggers've learned to fly...
~ Iain Banks
All I said was that I thought it was a judgement from God that Blyth had first lost his leg and then had the replacement become the instrument of his downfall. All because of the rabbits. Eric, who was going through a religious phase at the time which I suppose I was to some extent copying, thought this was a terrible thing to say; God wasn't like that. I said the one I believed in was.
~ Iain Banks
Chapter Five: The Cairngorms Disaster, 20 to 22 November 1971
~ Iain Thomson
other minds, must continue to fascinate us. As artificial people became more like us, then became us, then became more than us, we could never tire of them. They were bound to surprise us. They might fail us in ways that were beyond our imagining. Tragedy was a possibility, but not boredom.
~ Ian Mcewan
Briony knew her only reasonable choice then would be to run away, to live under hedges, eat berries and speak to no one, and be found by a bearded woodsman one winter's dawn, curled up at the base of a giant oak, beautiful and dead, and barefoot, or perhaps wearing the ballet pumps with the pink ribbon straps . . .
~ Ian Mcewan
Indiscriminate firebombing of the urban centers continued and intensified.
~ Ian W. Toll