Quotes About Tragedy

I wish I wasn't the face of the victims - three lost near the finish line and hundreds injured - because then everyone would forget about me, and I could recover in peace, and at my own pace.

We will always remember the victims of the horrific terror attacks of September 11th, 2001.

Putting a man on the moon united our nation in victory and we've collectively mourned through tragedies such as Apollo 1, the Challenger and Columbia.

I will not be remembered in history. I have not been shot. I have not launched any great tragedy or victory. I have not borne any great defeat. It was a very normal - it still is a very normal - human life of a political leader.

There is no tragedy more woeful than the victory of hate, nor any attainment so hopelessly barren as the sterility of that achievement; for hate is finality, and finality is the greatest evil which can happen in a world of movement.

I just don't think human beings are designed to have that big of a swing of emotions. I mean, I'm standing in Victory Lane literally seconds after Dale Earnhardt died. Dale Earnhardt was not only my car owner that day, my first victory in 463 tries, but he was my dear friend, too.

It is easy to fall into despair thinking about all that is wrong with the world. The joys seems so small in comparison. Internet videos of cats riding Roombas just can't compete with a father talking about how his dead 13-year-old son had wanted to be a pilot.

The drummer in my first band was killed in Vietnam. He kind of signed up and joined the marines. Bart Hanes was his name. He was one of those guys that was jokin' all the time, always playin' the clown.

Millions also perished in the Chinese camps, and there have been terrible genocides in Cambodia and Vietnam.

To me, Columbine is just as awful as Vietnam, and it's just as awful as anything else.

A generation ago, American war planners made the mistake of believing that short-term Communist sympathies would unite China and Vietnam. We were wrong, and it tragically misshaped our policy in Vietnam.

From my point of view, humour and irony include tragedy; they're two sides of the same coin.

Comedy and tragedy co-exist. You can't have one without the other. I'm of the school that anything can be funny if seen from a comedic point of view.

I believe history will come to view 9/11 as an event on par with November 22, 1963, the date on which John F. Kennedy was murdered, cutting short a presidency that was growing ever more promising. Dreams died that day in Dallas; it is easy to imagine the 1960s turning out rather differently had President Kennedy lived.

But one wrong half turn of a steering wheel, one patch of wet road, one out of control moment, and the amount of life measured out to Victoria Nolan had run cruelly short.

The news of Scarlet's death evoked some feeling in Owen, but there were too many other emotions, all vying for attention, canceling one another out. What remained was an oppressive depression mixed with caffeine withdrawal.

Looking at his dead son must have been like watching a movie where nothing moved. It was not photograph because it had duration. It had to be lived through. A photograph has none of that. This was a story without an ending. It would go on forever.

I'd been eleven when my father disappeared and eighteen when my mother was murdered. Now, I'm twenty-eight

If it is perfectly acceptable for a widow to disfigure herself or commit suicide to save face for her husband's family, why should a mother not be moved to extreme action by the loss of a child or children? We are their caretakers. We love them. We nurse them when they are sick. . . But no woman should live longer than her children. It is against the law of nature. If she does, why wouldn't she wish to leap from a cliff, hang from a branch, or swallow lye?

Love is always meant to be. Always, always, always. It is our sin, our folly, our feeble eyes that lead us astray. But love... love is love. Beyond us. Otherworldly. Godly. We capture a bit of the heavenly and hold it close and then it escapes us. We are so foolish, letting it depart! That is when tragedy occurs. Love...love is always meant to be. It may escape us, but it hovers nearby, waiting to be recaptured, held close.

The locus of the modern struggle with its enemy of death is clearly the body (not mind, society, or the afterworld). The body is the site of tragedy, the ultimate unresolvable paradox, for it is at once the source of life and of death.

The stage is more beholding to love, than the life of man; for as to the stage, love is even matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief; sometimes like a siren, sometimes like a fury.

It is not cheerful for a girl to discover within twenty-four hours of her wedding that her husband is a hopeless drunkard, and to see him die of delirium tremens within six weeks. An experience so vivid, like lightning must blast something in a woman's conception of life. Because one man's kisses reeked of whisky the kisses of all male humanity were anathema.

There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else.