Quotes About Tragedy

ever wanted. He loved the wild. He wanted to protect grizzlies. He would have understood that the grizzly was protecting her cubs. There were tracks everywhere. We should have known to stay away. My dad shouldn't have died that day. And those bears shouldn't have died, either.

Because at least one hundred of the people who died were schoolchildren.

Was the Chicago Fire the deadliest in U.S. history? The Great Chicago Fire is remembered because it destroyed a four-mile swath of one of America's most important cities. But it was not the deadliest fire. Amazingly the deadliest fire in U.S. history happened the very same day as the Great Chicago Fire, about 250 miles to the north, in Peshtigo, Wisconsin.

Despite these accommodations, anti-Semitism in Portugal led to a massacre of Jews in Lisbon in 1506.

that the unfortunate Europeans had not merely been killed but devoured as their shipmates looked on helplessly.

only 67 ships and ten thousand men survived, and many of those survivors perished as they tried to return to Spain.

In the immediate aftermath of the crash, a young police officer named Pat McCann, who happened to be training at the airport that day, saw a man who had managed to get the upper half of his body through his window before the lower half was incinerated inside the plane.

He listened to a fire fighter tell of a woman he had found strapped into her seat, screaming. When he cut the seat belt, she fell apart. She was being held together by the seat belt. She died at his feet.

Finally, I will never forget stopping near a lovely young girl still strapped to her seat, breathing slightly. Her blouse was white, her slacks were blue. At the end of the trousers were two snow-white ankle bones where her feet used to be. I had never seen the whiteness of bones that are freshly exposed like that.

As he walked along the runway, he came upon a United Airlines pilot. "He tried to sit up," Martz said. "I saw a huge triangular hole in his forehead and I told him to just lie still and that help was on the way, but it was too late for him.

He saw at least a dozen people still in their seats. Their clothes were torn or blown or burned from their bodies, "completely naked in front, missing limbs, missing faces, some breathing, some moaning, and others just deader than a door nail.

Two white teenagers, one of them an Eagle Scout, had been looking forward to being part of the motorcade. Upset at the cancellation, they drove into black neighborhoods on a motorcycle carrying a Confederate flag. When they came upon two black boys on bicycles, one of the white youths fired his pistol at thirteen-year-old Virgil Ware and killed him.

The office of drama is to exercise, possibly to exhaust, human emotions. The purpose of comedy is to tickle those emotions into an expression of light relief; of tragedy, to wound them and bring the relief of tears. Disgust and terror are the other points of the compass.

And, as the tiny lights drift into the blackness, the people pray that others around the world will remember Hiroshima and work for world peace. The atom bomb is too terrible a weapon. It must not drop again.

Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast.

There was a whole stack of casseroles in the fridge, a leaning tower of Pyrex baking dishes crimped in foil. As if no one knew what to do in the face of such tragedy except to make the heaviest, heartiest, most prosaic dish they could, to give the bereaved something solid to hold on to.

It was too big to talk about, what had happened. It was like a landscape they could not see all at once; it was like the sky at night, which turned and turned so they couldn't find its edges. It would always feel too big. He pushed her in. And then he pulled her out. All her life, Lydia would remember one thing. All his life, Nath would remember another.

Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.

Looking out over the lake, she could not know that in three months she would be at its bottom.

Lydia is dead.

Now she thought of the fly landing daintily in the pool of resin. Perhaps it had mistaken it for honey. Perhaps it hadn't seen the puddle at all. By the time it had realised its mistake, it was too late. It had flailed, and then it had sunk, and then it had drowned.

As if no one knew what to do in the face of such tragedy except to make the heaviest, heartiest, most prosaic dish they could, to give the bereaved something solid to hold on to.

If you are involved with the intensity of crescendo situations, with the intensity of tragedy, you might begin to see the humor of these situations as well. As in music, when we hear the crescendo building, suddenly if the music stops, we begin to hear the silence as part of the music.

I am convinced that the world is not a mere bog in which men and women trample themselves in the mire and die. Something magnificent is taking place here amid the cruelties and tragedies, and the supreme challenge to intelligence is that of making the noblest and best in our curious heritage prevail.