Quotes About Tragedy

In the first few days after the funeral, our interest in the Lisbon girls only increased. Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.

A tragédia se tornou difusa e universalizada.

Most people remember the Day of Grieving as an obscure holiday. The first three hours of school were canceled and we remained in our homerooms. Teachers passed out mimeographs related to the day's theme, which was never officially announced, as Mrs. Woodhouse felt it inappropriate to single out the girls' tragedy. The result was that the tragedy was diffused and universalized. As Kevin Tiggs put it, It seemed like we were supposed to feel sorry for everything that ever happened, ever.

fear good things happening because I believe something bad is sure to follow. Yin and yang, as comedy can't exist without tragedy. In my universe, pleasure and pain are opposite sides of the pendulum.

A few years ago, I read an article saying that the mortality rate for comedians is higher than those serving in the military. How heartbreaking is that? When we think of comedy, we think funny, light, and uplifting, never considering those for whom the burden was too much, like Robin Williams, Richard Jeni, Drake Sather, or Charles Rocket.

Nadine would never forget this death because it had been her eighth birthday. Arleen had come home late, striding into the trailer in wet underwear carrying a boxed cake so warm the frosted flowers had melted off the top. To this day, those innocuous cake boxes with the clear-plastic tops made Nadine's stomach clench.

Sometime after seven o'clock, a distant church bell began to toll, and then another joined it, and another, until all the bells in a Springfield resounded with the terrible news.

The Todd sisters all had survived tragedy. They all had endured loss—parents, husbands, children, whole nations and noble causes, all had fallen away, lost to time. If they could not rise above their old resentments to help a sister in need, would it not be said that they had learned nothing from their own suffering?

You think you get a dose of tragedy and that's that. You think it can't get any worse and that you're saved now. But tragedy is not like medicine. You don't get a dose like a pill or a spoonful. Tragedy always kicks in.

I remember McPhee's notes, penciled in the margins: If humor is tragedy plus time, this needs more time. It wasn't the first occasion I was forced to think about the line between funny and mean, between punching down, not up, to figure out how to write about the things that made me angry in a way that was powerful, not didactic or unhinged.

Great Johnstown Flood, which killed more than 2,300 people, 300 of them suffering the horrible irony of dying in fires started by the water.

Could life get any worse? She had read that great literature often comes out of great tragedy. If that was true, well, Shakespeare better move over.

We did our best to understand the murder: the murderer was a part of our lives; not so the victim.

Perhaps the world would soon become one vast incinerator for burning people.

Here and there nurses directed emaciated people in striped clothes; the soldiers looked at them in sudden silence—those were the people saved from the furnaces who were returning to life from the concentration camps.

Didn't say," Mr. Sullivan said, pretending the deep-fryer knobs needed fiddling with. "I'm really sorry about what happened to your friends.

Though there are only inches between them, for an instant his father is a stranger, a man who has kept a secret, has survived a tragedy, a man whose past he does not fully know. A man who is vulnerable, who has suffered in an inconceivable way.

By the time the paramedics had arrived she was dead from an aneurysm. She was in her thirties, unmarried, perpetually sipping herbal tea.

I watched your father killed before my eyes, she might have said.

There are three sayings I live by, and one of them is 'The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.' That's what losing a job is like. That's why we have to bring them back.

I didn't know Kurt Cobain or Amy Winehouse, but I was affected by both of their deaths because I admired their work so much and mourned their youth and work they would never produce.

When merciless ambition, or mad zeal, has led two hosts of dupes to battlefield, That, blind, they there may dig each other's graves, And call the sad work glory.

Hello! Your dear father is unfortunately very dead," he called. "And you said my dispersal system would never work!

The tragedy of life is when you do not know what to do with time