Quotes About Tragedy

What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending.

Nobody wants to read about happy people.

Curiously, the failures of Communism are more often treated as a joke than as a tragedy.

On the instant when we come to realize that tragedy is second-hand.

So the next day we all said, She will kill herself; and we said it would be the best thing.

It was her wedding dress and it had a flare-out bottom, and they had laid her head to foot in it so the dress could spread out, and they had made her a veil out of a mosquito bar so the auger holes in her face wouldn't show.

So the next day we all said, "She will kill herself"; and we said it would be the best thing.

The orchestra had ceased and were now climbing onto their chairs, with their instruments. The floral offerings flew; the coffin teetered. Catch it! a voice shouted. They sprang forward, but the coffin crashed heavily to the floor, coming open. The corpse tumbled slowly and sedately out and came to rest with its face in the center of a wreath. Play something! the proprietor bawled, waving his arms; play! Play!

If ever was such a misfortunate man," pa says.

We can invest trifles with a tragic profundity, which is the world.

He could not hear either; the galloping mare was almost upon him before he heard her, and even then he held his course, as if the very urgency of his wild grief and need must in a moment more find him wings

Walpole, that life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.

poor Byron, whose car had been run over by an autopiloted eighteen-wheeler on Valentine's Day, about

Not them. Didn't you hear what the pilot said? About the atom bomb? They're all dead.

Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across the square red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff came out and turned red. Piggy's arm sand legs twitched a bit, like a pig's after it has been killed. Then the sea breathed again in along, slow sigh, the water boiled white and pink over the rock; and when it went, sucking back again, the body of Piggy was gone.

What is like chemistry? Well. Life. It's an outrageous farce, Oliver, with an incompetent producer...

your milk, your milk has killed me" and then the child stiffened and cracked and turned in Buttercup's hands to nothing but dry dust and Buttercup screamed and screamed;

I have never heard of a suicide that I expected.

Fabian, the bishop of Rome, was decapitated. Julian, a Christian in Cilicia, in Turkey, was stuffed into a leather bag with a number of serpents and scorpions and then thrown into the ocean.

When the cops were unable to catch a man named James "Bluebeard" Watson, who'd married eighteen women and killed at least seven of them, Harris

Where [God] is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the absolutely final things.

There were some ten million Jews living in 1939 in the territories occupied by Hitler's forces. By any estimate it is certain that nearly half of them were exterminated by the Germans. This was the final consequence and the shattering cost of the aberration which came over the Nazi dictator in his youthful gutter days in Vienna and which he imparted to—or shared with—so many of his German followers.

But not by Hermann Goering. He cheated the hangman. Two hours before his turn would have come he swallowed a vial of poison that had been smuggled into his cell. Like his Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, and his rival for the succession, Heinrich Himmler, he had succeeded at the last hour in choosing the way in which he would depart this earth, on which he, like the other two, had made such a murderous impact.

There are gods and catastrophes.