Quotes About Tragedy

a little downy girl still wearing poppies still eating popcorn in the colored gloam where tawny Indians took paid croppers because you stole her from her wax-browed and dignified protector spitting into his heavy-lidded eye ripping his flavid toga and at dawn leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort the awfulness of love and violets remorse despair while you took a dull doll to pieces and threw its head away because of all you did because of all I did not you have to die

Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.

When, on a Sunday evening in May 1876, Anna throws herself under the freight train, she has existed more than four years since the beginning of the novel, but in the case of the Lyovins, during the same period, 1872 to 1876, hardly three years have elapsed. It is the best example of relativity in literature that is known to me.

I am lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows and a queer accent, and a cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile.

I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.

I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.

he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster

One had to forget - because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past.

I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake. Spectacular explosion. Her mother is messily but instantly and permanently eliminated, along with everybody else for miles around.

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three

Oh my Carmen, my little Carmen! Something, something, those something nights, And the stars, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen - And, O my charmin', our dreadful fights. And the something town where so gaily, arm in Arm we went, and our final row, And the gun I killed you with, O my Carmen, The gun I am holding now.

Actually the question of mortal precedence has now hardly any importance. I mean, the hero and heroine should get so close to each other by the time the horror begins, so organically close, that they overlap, intergrade, interache, and even if Vaniada's end is described in the epilogue we, writers and readers, should be unable to make out (myopic, myopic) who exactly survives, Dava or Vada, Anda or Vanda.

Mama mea, femeie fotogenic?, a murit în modul cel mai absurd (picnic, tr?snet) când aveam trei ani ÅŸi, în afara unui nor de c?ldur? în umbra trecutului, ea n-a l?sat nici o urm? pe drumurile pustii ale amintirii peste care a apus soarele copil?riei mele.

L'autre soir un air froid d'opéra m'alita; Son félé -- bien fol est qui s'y fie! Il neige, le décor s'écroule, Lolita! Lolita, qu'ai-je fait de ta vie? Dying, dying, Lolita Haze, Of hate and remorse, I'm dying. And again my hairy fist I raise, And again I hear you crying.

The fatal gesture passed like the tail of a falling star across the blackness of the contemplated crime.

My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses

O my Carmen, my little Carmen! Something, something those something nights, And the stars, and the cars, and the bars, and the     barmen – And, O my charmin', our dreadful fights. And the something town where so gaily, arm in Arm, we went, and our final row, And the gun I killed you with, O my Carmen, The gun I am holding now. (Drew his .32 automatic, I guess, and put a bullet through his moll's eye.) Fourteen

I could not bring myself to touch him in order to make sure he was really dead. He looked it: a quarter of his face gone, and two flies beside themselves with a dawning sense of unbelievable luck.

I wonder if during the course of these tragic notes, I have sufficiently stressed the sending quality of my striking, if perhaps somewhat brutal good looks". (Humbert in Lolita)

In 1880, after the assassination of Alexander II, the mobs, aided by the Czar's soldiers, burned and butchered their way through one Jewish community after another, leaving a new word in their wake: pogrom.

The full-blooded description of this truth, the recognition and dramatization of a political cycle of birth, death, rebirth, defeat, renewal—this is true tragedy, in which absolute loss and devastation, Nothing is arrived at, and from this Nothing, something new is born.

FELIX: Whoever thought you'd die from having sex?

Update: Caleb Norton remains in a comma with no brain function. The hit-and-run driver remains at large.

This is the terrible thing about a tragedy. It isn't with you every minute. You forget it, and then you remember it again.