Quotes About Tragedy

She suggested that...I should examine what I had been trying to shoot at and punch and kill for so long- whether or not I had, perhaps, denied some more gentle part of my nature, and if so, what had it cost me. And don't get a tattoo for your forehead, she said, smiling. It's entirely unnecessary. As proof, she held her hands in front of her. Wiggled her fingers and smiled. Our being human made us tragic and comic both, she has said; the gods both laughed and wept.

What fools men are, and what an evil thing is war.

I kept changing the station, over and over around the dial, but all I got were those two channels, or snow. I had spent half my life watching TV. I thought again about the paperweight. I'd had it less than a week when I shook too hard and accidentally sent it flying across my bedroom where it hit the floor and cracked. Leaked, became useless. At the time, it was my biggest tragedy—breaking that paperweight.

We buried my husband, Claude, today, finally. Me and Belinda Jean. His emphysema took him nine days ago, but the wake and funeral had to be put off because of the flood. McPadden's Funeral Parlor was in the water's path.

not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo, The hundred & fifty are dumb yet at Alamo.

Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.

the British computer pioneer who broke the German wartime codes and then committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-

Throughout human history, we have been subjected to wave after wave of viral and bacterial plagues. The first known one was the Babylon flu epidemic around 1200 BC. The plague of Athens in 429 BC killed close to 100,000 people, the Antonine plague in the second century killed ten million, the plague of Justinian in the sixth century killed fifty million, and the Black Death of the fourteenth century took almost 200 million lives, close to half of Europe's population.

Raskin died of pancreatic cancer in 2005, not long after Jobs was diagnosed with the disease.

It is a rash man indeed who would set himself up as final arbiter on all that happened the incredible night the Titanic went down.

In the case of the living, the Register carefully ran the phrase, 'Arrived Titan-Carpath , April 18, 1912.' The hyphen represented history's greatest sea disaster.

Seen and unseen, the great and the unknown tumbled together in a writhing heap as the bow plunged deeper and the stern rose higher.

the widows of the slain, to the number of eleven score, in deep mourning, riding upon white palfreys, and each bearing her husband's bloody shirt on a spear, appeared

May 4, 1970—the same day as the horror show at Kent State University in Ohio, where four students were killed

She was married to my dad, and everything was fine until he got killed in some freak tractor accident. Yeah, that's what I said, a freak tractor accident.

death by banana peel or pratfall or (my favorite, I confess) onstage, like the actor Harold Norman, killed in 1947 during an especially energetic sword fight in the last scene of Macbeth. There is also the particularly unwelcome death

Here's an image that sticks: imagine a loaded Boeing 747 crashing every three days, killing everyone aboard. That's how many people die on U.S. highways every year.

The genius of free human beings is that, given responsibility, they join together to take care of each other—to be their brothers' keepers when their brother needs help. The triumph of an earlier America was that it had set all the right trends in motion, at a time when the world was first coming out of millennia of poverty into an era of plenty. The tragedy of contemporary America is that it abandoned that course. Libertarians want to return to it.

An earlier plan to marry again had collapsed when her fiancé was killed in a motorcycle accident. His name was Don and he had taught oriental methods of self-defense in a martial arts academy. "They called it an accident," she said, "but I think the government had him killed because he knew too much about flying saucers.

People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.

Heracles' heroic world and Deianeira's warmth and tenderness are mutually exclusive. Sophocles seeks not to vindicate the one against the other, but to dramatize the tragedy of their irreconcilability and their mutual destructiveness.

During the twentieth century, communist governments killed some 100 million of their own people in peacetime, either by repression or by famine.

One of life's sorest tragedies is that the people who brim with confidence are always the wrong people.

In the creation of comedy, it is paradoxical that tragedy stimulates the spirit of ridicule; because ridicule, I suppose is an attitude of defiance: we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature - or go insane