Quotes About Tragedy

a mother who loses her child can no longer believe in God

There were corpses here and there and pools of blood. I remember seeing a butterfly flutter up and down that street. Summer does not abdicate.

Quasimodo then lifted his eye to look upon the gypsy girl, whose body, suspended from the gibbet, he beheld quivering afar, under its white robes, in the last struggles of death; then again he dropped it upon the archdeacon, stretched a shapeless mass at the foot of the tower, and he said with a sob that heaved his deep breast to the bottom, 'Oh-all that I've ever loved!' The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Si tout autour de moi, est monotone et décoloré, n'y a-t-il pas en moi une tempête, une lutte, une tragédie?

Catastrophes have a somber way of arranging things.

Or, donner la grosse cloche en mariage à Quasimodo, c'était donner Juliette à Roméo.

The four walls of the living redoubt had fallen, hardly could a quivering be detected here and there among the corpses; and thus the French legions, grander than the Roman legions, expired at Mont-Saint-Jean on ground soaked in rain and blood, in the somber wheatfields, at the spot where today at four in the morning, whistling, and gaily whipping up his horse, Joseph drives by with the mail from Nivelles.

But what was tragic about the girl was that she had not been born ugly. She might even have been a pretty child, and the grace proper to her age was still at odds with the repulsive premature aging induced by loose living and poverty. A trace of beauty still lingered in the sixteen-year-old face, like pale sunlight fading beneath the massed clouds of a winter's dawn.

La dicha que habría podido encontrar en la tierra si ella no hubiera sido gitana ni él sacerdote; si Febo no hubiera existido y si ella lo hubiera amado.

Night sometimes lends such tragic assistance to catastrophe.

War has frightful beauties which we have not concealed; it has also, we acknowledge, some hideous features. One of the most surprising is the prompt stripping of the bodies of the dead after the victory. The dawn which follows a battle always rises on naked corpses.

At five in the morning, some policemen, unannounced, entered the house of a man named Pardon, later a member of the section of the Barricade-Merry, and still later killed in the insurrection of April 1834, found him standing not far from his bed, with cartridges in his hands, caught in the act.

He saw nothing of all this. People who are crushed do not look behind them. They know but too well the evil fate which follows them.

Bewigged tragedy has a reason for its existence.

Il dort. Quoique le sort fut pour lui bien étrange, Il vivait. Il mourut quand il n'eut plus son ange. La chose simplement d'elle-même arriva, Comme la nuit se fait lorsque le jour s'en va.

There his wife died of a malady of the chest, from which she had long suffered. He had no children.

Il est la chandelle du sépulcre. Éclairer l'ouverture inexorable, avertir de l'inévitable, pas de plus tragique ironie.

The truth was that her photographs were an extension of who she was, what she thought, how she felt. It took perfect concentration to capture the exquisite pain of personal tragedy on film. You had to be there one hundred percent, in the moment - but it had to be their moment.

Tragedy was like that, a razor that sliced through time, severing the now from the before, incising the what-might-have-been from reality as cleanly as any surgeon's blade.

For the first time in her career, the tragedy of it all was nearly unbearable. It wasn't worse here than where she'd been before. That wasn't it. The situation hadn't changed. She had. She carried grief with her everywhere, and the burden of it made compartmentalization impossible.

If she opened her mouth she might start screaming. Or if she looked at him she might cry, might demand to know how it was that children could be shot in the dark for nothing.

Vianne knelt down beside Sarah, she felt for a pulse and found none. The silence turned sour, thick; all Vianne could think about was the sound of this child's laughter and how empty the world would be without it.

She knew about death, about the grief that ripped you apart and left you broken forever.

When Elsa had lost her third child—a son who never drew breath—it was Rose who held Elsa and let her cry, and said, Some lives are not ours to hold on to; God makes His choices without us.