Quotes About Tragedy

You might say that is "too young" to die. But what is too young for a life?

What do you do when you lose a loved one too quickly? When you have no time to prepare before, suddenly, that soul is gone?

But this orange raft and its hidden notebook? They were a jolt to that misery. He wasn't sure why. Maybe it was the idea that something—even a few pages of something—had endured a tragedy and crossed an ocean to find him. It had survived. And witnessing survival can make us believe in our own.

But today is not yesterday, and the Reb could do nothing but listen to the worst imaginable words—We couldn't save her—told to him by a doctor he had never met before that night. How could this happen? She had been perfectly normal earlier in the day, a playful child, her whole life before her. We couldn't save her? Where is the logic, the order of life?

After Lilly's death, Inspector LeFleur viewed things differently. Why turn to God now? Where was God when his MIL fell asleep? Where was God when his daughter got swept into the sea? What kind of God lets a child die that way? There was no comfort in invisible forces, not for LeFleur. There was only what got put in front of you and how you dealt with it. If he was in the lifeboat he would have pinned him down and held Him accountable for all the horrors He allowed in this world.

Winds blew," she said. Tolbert left, never knowing another wind that had blown, one he had diverted, yanking Paulo to the side of the road on that rainy night, preventing a speeding car from striking him, a tragedy that a different version of the world had planned, a version that did not grant Annie and Paulo even one night of marriage, nor the child that would come from it. But there are so many times our lives are altered invisibly. The flip of a pencil, from written to erased.

Fairness," he said, "does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young.

I'm not very good at knowing what other people are thinking, but I do know that you can see tragedy, real tragedy, sitting just inside a person's gaze. You can almost always see where a person has been if you look hard enough.

The tragedy of being both rational and animal seems to consist in having to choose between duty and desire rather than in making any particular choice

The greatest tragedy in life is not death, but a life without a purpose.

One of the greatest tragedies in life is to watch potential die untapped.

We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.

He groped for and cupped her hot little slew from behind, then frantically scrambled into a boy's sandcastle- molding position; but she turned over, naively ready to embrace him the way Juliet is recommended to receive her Romeo.

Laments were as old as verses of love, she knew. They were verses of love. For the departed who will never be met again, for the burned cities.

One of my top ten favorite novels in any category is Stephanie Plowman's The Road to Sardis, a heartbreaking retelling of the events of the Peloponnesian War, which broke out in 431 B.C. between longtime rivals Athens and Sparta, and lasted for twenty-seven years.

Kader was the worst fire in industrial history, taking more lives than the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire that killed 146 young workers in New York City in 1911. The parallels between Triangle and Kader — separated from each other by half a world, and eighty-two years of so-called development — are chilling: it was as if time hadn't moved forward, but had simply shifted locations.

Hands are wrung about the "migrant crisis"—but not nearly so much about the crises driving the migrations. Since 2014, an estimated thirteen thousand people have drowned in the Mediterranean trying to reach European shores.

And so does pity lead straight to disaster.

I do think that all of us think in poems. I think of a poem as being deeper than headline news. You know how they talk about breaking news all the time, that -- if too much breaking news, trying to absorb all the breaking news, you start feeling really broken. And you need something that takes you to a place that's a little more timeless, that kind of gives you a place to stand to look out at all these things. Otherwise, you just feel assaulted by all of the tragedy in the world.

what twists or rage greater than we could ever guess had savaged skylines, thousands of lives?

He's mourning his son, number 3000 American dead in Iraq, but as far as he can feel, the worst one.

From Why I could not accept your invitation Forgive me. Culture is everything right now. But I cannot pretend a scrap of investment in the language that allows human beings to kill one another systematically, abstractly, distantly. The language wrapped around 37,000, or whatever the number is today, dead and beautiful bodies thrown into holes without any tiny, reasonable goodbye.

Only God, my dear," wrote Yeats blithely, "Could love you for yourself alone/And not your yellow hair." This quote is meant as a bit of lighthearted verse. But it is an epic tragedy in three lines.

Over the past three thousand years, smallpox may have killed more people than any other disease on Earth.