Quotes About Tragedy

The difference between a short story and a novel is the difference between an inarticulate pang in your heart compared to the tragedy of your whole life.

Sometimes Barry plays the most depressing things." "Joy Division," said Banks. "He committed suicide. The lead singer." "I'm not bloody surprised. I'd commit suicide if I sounded like him.

the English lost at most 500 men, including only two lords, the Earl of Suffolk and the Duke of York. Shakespeare's Exeter gives these two noblemen a brilliant chivalric epitaph; history, however, adds its usual sour note by pointing out that York perished, not by the sword, but by suffocation or a heart attack after falling off his horse. He was quite fat.

It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.

What a tragic realm this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don't know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not understand what it means.

The tragedy in his life already existed. To love an atmospheric spirit. That was the real sorrow. Hopelessness itself. Nowhere on the printed page, nowhere in the annals of man, would her name appear: no local habitation, no name. There are girls like that, he thought, and those you love most, the ones where there is no hope because it has eluded you at the very moment you close your hands around it.

Emily Dickinson was full of shit when she prattled about "kindly Death"; that's an abominable thought, that death is kind. She never saw a six-car pile-up on the Eastshore Freeway.

What a tragic world this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don't know it; they think they are free because they never have been free, and do not understand what it means. This is a prison, and few men have guessed. But I know, he said to himself. Because that is why I am here. To burn the walls, to tear down the metal gates, to break each chain.

Marisa! Marisa!" The cry was torn from Lord Asriel, and with the snow leopard beside her, with a roaring in her ears, Lyra's mother stood and found her footing and leapt with all her heart, to hurl herself against the angel and her daemon and her dying lover, and seize those beating wings, and bear them all down together into the abyss.

Men we have never met took our son. They took him without our express permission. They tortured him then they … killed him. And there is no understanding it. There is no meaning. No coming to terms with it. Not now. Not tomorrow. Not ever. We will wake up every day for the rest of our lives and we will breathe razor blades and we will swim through bleach. And there is no escape from this. There is no comfort. There is just … blades and bleach. Until we die.

It's so heartbreaking, violence, when it's in a house-like seeing the clothes in a tree after an explosion. You may be prepared to see death but not the clothes in the tree.

The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy—that is every man's tragedy.

It was impossible to believe that Alan was lying in that pale, plain pine box merely from having caught a summertime disease. That box from which you cannot force your way out. That box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever. The rest of us live and grow older by the day, but he remains twelve. Millions of years go by, and he is still twelve.

The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy—that is every man's tragedy.

L'umano desiderio di un principio, una parte di mezzo e una fine - e una fine adeguata, come grandezza, a quel principio e a quella parte di mezzo - si realizzava così completamente soltanto nella materia insegnata da Coleman all'Athena College. Ma al di fuori della tragedia classica del quinto secolo a.C. aspettarsi un compimento, per non dire una giusta e perfetta conclusione, significa, per un adulto, cullarsi in una stolta illusione.

Here is someone not set up for life's working out poorly, let alone for the impossible. But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy--that is every man's tragedy.

What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as heroes and martyrs, 'sacrifices on the altar of freedom'?

One day the enemy will cross the Great Green. They will bring war and tragedy to these eastern lands. Such is the nature of vile men. Yet we cannot live in dread of them. We cannot hide behind these high walls, our hearts trembling. For that is not life. We must accept the needs and the duties of each day, and face them one at a time.

Now the screams were awful to hear as men burned like candles all along the deck. Black smoke billowed over the sea. Argurios could not believe what he was watching. At least fifty helpless men were dying in agony. One man managed to free himself and leap into the sea. Amazingly, when he surfaced the flames were still consuming him. All along the beach there was silence as the stunned crowd watched the magical fires burning the galley and it's crew.

As the Khmer Rouge were about to take over, Noam Chomsky wrote that their advent heralded a Cambodian liberation, "a new era of economic development and social justice." The new era turned out to be the killing-fields that took the lives of two million Cambodians.

Since the progressive doctrine of The Silent Spring was implemented, three million people have died of malaria every year for more than thirty years, adding up to a total now of nearly 100 million. Ninety-five percent of the victims have been black African children under the age of five. As a footnote to this tragedy, Carson's claim that DDT was harmful to birds has since been discredited.

His life was a party which tragically came to an early end.

I could blame everyone else for not feeling the pain I felt, or I could feel my own grief without any expectations about how anyone else should feel. I could have gratitude for whatever kindness people extended to me, while recognizing that they could not be expected to share my feelings. This was my tragedy, not theirs. I thought of the Auden poem "Musée des Beaux Arts," about suffering "while someone else is eating or opening a window.

WHAT WAS JANE AUSTEN'S LAST FINISHED NOVEL? Vaginas and Virginity. WHO IS THE LAST PERSON IAGO KILLS IN OTHELLO? His manservant Retardio, for forgetting to change the Brita filter! WHAT HAPPENS TO THE LITTLE MERMAID AT THE END OF CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN'S THE LITTLE MERMAID? She turns into a fish and marries Nemo! Fuck you!