Quotes About Tragedy

What madness destroyed me and you, Orpheus?

Queaque ipsa miserrima vidi,et quorum pars magna fui. (And those terrible things I saw, and in which I played a great part.)

Ter circum Iliacos raptaverat Hectora muros, exanimumque auro corpus vendebat Achilles.

But of course—so Turnus can fetch his royal bride— our lives are cheap, scattered in piles across the field, unburied and unwept.

How fortunate were you, thrice fortunate and more, whose luck it was to die under the high walls of Troy before your parents' eyes!

Haec finis Priami fatorum; hic exitus illum sorte tulit, Troiam incensam et prolapsa videntem Pergama, tot quondam populis terrisque superbum regnatorem Asiae.  Iacet ingens litore truncus, avolsumque umeris caput, et sine nomine corpus.

In foribus letum Androgeo:  tum pendere poenas Cecropidae iussi---miserum!---septena quotannis corpora natorum; stat ductis sortibus urna.

Heu, miserande puer, si qua fata aspera rumpas, tu Marcellus eris. Manibus date lilia plenis, purpureos spargam flores...» «O giovane degno di pietà, se solo tu potessi rompere il tuo fato crudele, tu sarai Marcello. Versate gigli a piene mani, che io sparga fiori purpurei...»

With horror he saw that her hair was already afire as the tarred stake burned about her head. He held her agonized gaze with his fierce black eyes. I'll love you forever, and beyond, he vowed as he raised both arms and plunged his sword into her heart. ~Marcus Magnus

That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.

Tragedies come in the hungry hours.

The tumult of the present seems like a elegy for past youth and past summers, and there rose in her mind a curious sadness, as if time and eternity showed through skirts and waistcoats, and she saw people passing tragically to destruction.

The tragedy of her death was not that it made one, now and then and very intensely, unhappy. It was that it made her unreal; and us solemn, and self-conscious. We were made to act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know. It obscured, it dulled.

But for us the tragedy was but just beginning; as in the case of other wounds the pain was drugged at the moment, and made itself felt afterwards when we began to move. There was pain in all our circumstances, or a dull discomfort, a kind of restlessness and aimlessness which was even worse. Misery of this kind tends to concentrate itself upon an object, if it can find one, and there was a figure, unfortunately, who would serve our purpose very well.

En cierta manera, esto era su desastre, su desdicha. Era su castigo el ver hundirse y desaparecer aquí a un hombre, allá a una mujer, en esa profunda oscuridad, mientras ella estaba obligada a permanecer aquí con su vestido de noche.

She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble.

it struck her, this was tragedy-- not palls, dust, and the shroud; but children coerced, their spirits subdued.

The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her usual robust health and was seen by onlookers to turn visibly to powder and be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs as the icy blast struck her at the street corner.

Yet five minutes after she had passed the statue of Achilles she had the rapt look of one brushing through crowds on a summer's afternoon, when the trees are rustling, the wheels churning yellow, and the tumult of the present seems like an elegy for past youth and past summers, and there rose in her mind a curious sadness, as if time and eternity showed through skirts and waistcoats, and she saw people passing tragically to destruction.

She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?

With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes—one of the tragedies of married life.

Quanh Ä'ây, nó nghÄ©, kh?a nh?ng ngón tay c?a nó trong lòng nÆ°á»›c, có má»™t con thuy?n Ä'ã b? ??m, nó th?m thì má»™t cách mÆ¡ màng, ná»­a mê ná»­a t?nh, chúng ta b? m?ng t?ng ng??i, Ä'Æ¡n Ä'á»™c bi?t bao.

She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane...