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Quotes About Tragedy

Then he looked by him, and was ware of a damsel that came riding as fast as her horse might gallop upon a fair palfrey. And when she espied that Sir Lanceor was slain, then she made sorrow out of measure, and said, O Balin ! two bodies hast thou slain and one heart, and two hearts in one body, and two souls thou hast lost.
~ Thomas Malory
The dilemma, my dear sir, the tragedy, begins where nature has been cruel enough to split the personality, to shatter its harmony by imprisoning a noble and ardent spirit within a body not fit for the stresses of life. Have you heard of Leopardi, Engineer, or you, Lieutenant? An unhappy poet of my own land, a crippled, ailing man, born with a great soul, which his sufferings were constantly humiliating and dragging down into the depths of irony—its lamentations rend the heart to hear.
~ Thomas Mann
To see how seriously men take things and yet how little their seriousness profits them. Their tragedy makes our mediocrity all the more terrible.
~ Thomas Merton
Ten million dead. Gas. Passchendaele. Let that be now a large figure, now a chemical formula, now an historical account. But dear lord, not the Nameless Horror, the sudden prodigy sprung on a world unaware. We all saw it. There was no innovation, no special breach of nature, or suspension of familiar principles. If it came as any surprise to the public then their own blindness is the Great Tragedy, hardly the war itself.
~ Thomas Pynchon
Yet is Dixon certain, as certain as the lightness he feels now, lightness premonitory of Flying, that far worse happen'd here, to these poor People, as the blood flew and the Children cried, - that at the end no one understood what they said as they died.
~ Thomas Pynchon
When Melos eventually had to surrender to the besieging army of Athenian and allied forces, its men were killed and its women and children sold into slavery.
~ Thomas R. Martin
LONG, long before Mrs. Lewis cooked for the Burbanks, a tree fell on Mr. Lewis in the woods and killed him in his "prime." Mrs. Lewis hoped to be one with him again in what she called their eternal home, but the suspended relationship left her with a mixed bag of acid sayings, bitter observations and chilly maxims.
~ Thomas Savage
but is also a vision of themselves and of their moral role in that world. It is a vision of differential rectitude. It is not a vision of the tragedy of the human condition: Problems exist because others are not as wise or as virtuous as the anointed.
~ Thomas Sowell
Mi tragedia es mi madre. Viviendo con ella, vivo en el ataúd de mis aspiraciones nonatas
~ Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry (1888–1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. When she was 19, Mansfield left New Zealand and settled in the United Kingdom, where she became a friend of modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. During the First World War, she contracted extrapulmonary tuberculosis, which led to her death at the age of 34.
~ Katherine Mansfield
Las musas tenían por costumbre aniquilar a los que inspiraban.
~ Katherine Neville
I stopped in the tiny garden that encloses the Tolsta war memorial. The bronze plaque lists too many names for this small place; the same surnames recur over and again. The memorial, in the shape of an open book, also remembers the many soldiers who were returning to Lewis from the Great War, only to be drowned when their ship, the Iolaire, struck rocks outside Stornoway Harbour, which is a difficult one to make sense of.
~ Kathleen Jamie
Hers was a toughness born from bitterness and tragedy, where every ounce of optimism or humour had been beaten out of her by experience.
~ Kathleen Jones
FINDING FORGIVENESS : THE EXTRAORDINARY LEGACY OF AMY BIEHL AND HER FAMILY
~ Kathleen McGowan
Everything that happened in life-whether for good or bad, joyous or tragic reasons-held the potential to sanctify and bring one closer to the Lord. Even, Abby realized, the personal pain and horror of loss. In life's catastrophic upheavals, in the self-fragmentation, confusion, and spirit-shattering grief, there was always the hope of rebirth to a new and even better life-a life not of this world but of the Spirit.
~ Kathleen Morgan
The tragedy of sin is that it diverts gifts. The person who has a genuine capacity for loving becomes promiscuous, maybe sexually, or maybe by becoming frivolous and fickle, afraid to make a commitment to anyone or anything. The person with a gift for passionate intensity squanders it in angry tirades and, given power, becomes a demagogue.
~ Kathleen Norris
Why is eight years old middle-aged?" he asked a detective one day. When the man asked what Tim meant, he said, "Laura died at sixteen. For her, eight was middle-aged.
~ Kathryn Casey
For seven men she gave her life. For one good man she was his wife. Beneath the ice by Snow White Falls, there lies the fairest of them all.
~ Kathryn Wesley
Same green walls. Same table. Same roster of death due to malice, melancholy, folly or fate. Morin did the honours. A dealer, held and punched by two rivals, dropped to the sidewalk and never got up. Probable homicide by rotation and hyperextension of the head. A man noosed his neck to a tree and hit the gas in his pickup. Probably suicide by self-decapitation. A meth addict slept naked on his balcony and froze to death. Probably accident by supreme stupidity.
~ Kathy Reichs
Violent death allows no privacy. It plunders one's dignity as surely as it has taken one's life.
~ Kathy Reichs
Angela had been the first of us. She'd been found on a park bench by some dawn jogger or dog walker, her throat slit, her sandals lined up next to her bare feet. And did you ever notice how these are the people who are always discovering the bodies, these people whose lives are so orderly that they can rise early enough to find a whole other human being dumped on the ground?
~ Katie Williams
War is sorrowful. The flames of war burns away life and dreams and bonds, leaving behind countless sorrows. Sorry gives birth to tragedy, And tragedy gives birth to Akuma." (Lavi Bookman)
~ Katsura Hoshino
Put on a smile…little Pierrot. Tragedy has thrust us…together upon this stage!
~ Katsura Hoshino
Suicide is not a blot on anyone's name; it is a tragedy
~ Kay Redfield Jamison