Quotes About Tragedy

I don't want to be callous about it, but we all seemed to get over the Oklahoma bombing pretty quickly, and we're never going to get over 9/11.

I think you have to find the humanity in the character and then the deterioration is a part of the process - the journey of the character. It's like playing King Lear. You can start off as a nice old man who finishes up crazy.

My father grew up in Levittown, L.I., in the first tract housing built for G.I.'s. His dad had stormed the beaches of Omaha and died when my father was very young. My dad had to raise himself, pretty much.

It's scary when one day the city is there and the next day it's gone. To see the water actual kill people, I couldn't believe it. I never fathomed it could bury a city.

No parents deserve to see their only child die.

I just looked preposterous. It would be 'King Lear' and I'd walk on with Cordelia's dead body in my arms and the audience would hoot with laughter. The only time they didn't laugh was when I was doing comedy.

If I got hit by a bus tomorrow, you'd get people going: 'Oh, we should make 'Mother' into an opera, it's what he would have wanted.'

The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.

It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is why music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret.

Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled. Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of Brabantio died. But don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they are.

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.

En este mundo sólo hay dos tragedias: una es no conseguir lo que deseas y la otra conseguirlo.

For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.

To be in Society is merely a bore. But to be out of it simply a tragedy. Society is a necessary thing.

The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives.

When he takes the knife to the canvass the servants find him lying dead with a knife through is heart and withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. and the portrait in all the wonders of his exquisite youth and beauty. p 349

For each man kills the thing he loves yet each man does not die he does not die a death of shame on a day of dark disgrace nor have a noose about his neck, nor a cloth upon his face nor drop feet foremost through the floor into an empty space He does not sit with silent men who watch him night and day Who watch him when he tries to weep and when he tries to pray Who watch him lest himself should rob the prison of its prey

I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.

And each man kills the thing he loves.

Yes, we are overcharged for everything nowadays. I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.

Yet ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the space of three years he died. And he who came after him ruled evilly.

The real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.

Why is it that I can't feel this tragedy as much as I want to?

We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken.