Quotes About Tragedy

When Williams unleashed his fury on Po Toke, the old mahout, sobbing, admitted that Bandoola was dead. He claimed he did not know what had happened.

Two riders led Williams to the body. "There lay Bandoola," Williams would write. He stared in disbelief at the rotting corpse, not quite ready to comprehend that his hero was gone. Bandoola's right tusk had been hacked off, and the left remained plowed into the earth where his head had fallen. A single bullet fired directly into his skull had killed him.

James Howard Williams died during an emergency appendectomy. So accustomed to the burning ache of his ulcer, he mistook the new, sharper agony as more of the same. The man who never spoke of his woes stoically bore the pain of a burst appendix until it was too late.

What caused the gods to fall upon my family like starved lions in a Roman arena?

My father invented a cure for which there was no disease and unfortunately my mother caught it and died of it.

Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Dismal plain!

It would be tedious to continue piling example upon example, statistic upon statistic. For at a certain point, a feeling of deep lethargy sets in, and our reaction is: 'What's the use?' or 'What can one man possibly do?' If we respond in this manner, we are lost. For it is precisely by shifting problems from the trivial to the tragic plane, by forsaking a personal view for a cosmic one, that we rationalize and manage to shrug off our own personal responsibility.

An unhappy ending makes it literature rather than romantic fiction.

It never seems to occur to some people, that, like beauty, a sense of humor may sometimes be fatal.

Starlets were always turning up dead in people's pools. They fished them out like goldfish. Nobody seemed to find it unusual that so many young, beautiful women wanted to die.

How beautiful, if sorrow had not made Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self.

I'm overflowing with stories, delighted and quite mad with the beauty and tragedy of them.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

His voice was like honey and velvet. "Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath, hath had no power yet upon thy beauty," he murmured, and I recognized the line spoken by Romeo in the tomb.

When I turned 18, I lost my best friend to a car accident.

I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar.

The tragedy of Africa is that Africans are in the business of canonizing thieves and demonizing its saints.

The tragedy is that Dell didn't win it - we lost it.

You know, there's a big lie in this business. The lie is that it's okay to go out in flames. But that doesn't do anybody much good. I may be wrong, but I think Hendrix was trying to come around.

We are in the same tent as the clowns and the freaks-that's show business.

In real life, one of my friends was killed in a car accident during our sophomore year.

If you grow up in the suburbs, you hear of people dying of old age, car wrecks, cancer. In the city, it's always people dying of violence or stray bullets.

He leaned about the same way in falling towards Jacqueline, forward, down towards the bottom of the car.

The car crash that took the lives of these two lovely people has been portrayed as a traffic accident caused by a drunk driving at high speed. The reality is that it was murder.