Quotes About Tragedy

When you fly across the country in an airplane the country seems vast; but it isn't vast. It's all connected by roads one can ride a bike down. If you watch the news and there's a tragedy at a house in Kansas, that guy's driveway connects with yours, and you'd be surprised by how few roads it takes to get there.

Almost without exception the most beautiful, selfless people I've met are ones who've experienced personal tragedy.

I didn't want to get well, because if I got well, nobody would come and save me anymore. And I didn't want to get well, because while I could not control my happiness, I could control my misery, and I would rather have had control than live in the tension of what if. A chance of hope is no pacifier against a sure tragedy.

The great tragedy of our lives seems to be that we are smart enough to ask the questions of meaning but too dumb to really figure it out.

I kept imagining these people, just living their daily lives, and then having them suddenly ended in unjust tragedy. When we watch the news, we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it. Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller.

After a tragedy, I think God gives us a period of numbing as a kind of grace. Perhaps he knows our small minds, given so easily to false hope, couldn't handle the full brunt of reality.

When he was almost two, his father was killed in battle during the Seven Years War, the world's first global combat.

I didn't want to get well, because if I got well, nobody would come and save me anymore. And I didn't want to get well, because while I could not control my happiness, I could control my misery, and I would rather have had control than live in the tension of what if. A chance of hope is no pacifier against a sure tragedy.

La narrativa que sale de una empresa (y, de hecho, también la que circula internamente por ella) debe ser clara. En una historia, el público debe saber en todo momento quién es el héroe, lo que quiere el héroe, a quién tiene que derrotar el héroe para conseguir lo que quiere, la tragedia que se producirá si el héroe no gana y el acontecimiento maravilloso que se producirá en caso contrario.

A chance of hope is no pacifier against a sure tragedy.

In a story, audiences must always know who the hero is, what the hero wants, who the hero has to defeat to get what they want, what tragic thing will happen if the hero doesn't win, and what wonderful thing will happen if they do.

Does such a thing as the fatal flaw, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

I had said goodbye to her once before, but it took everything I had to say goodbye to her then, again, for the last time, like poor Orpheus turning for a last backward glance at the ghost of his only love and in the same heartbeat losing her forever: hinc illae lacrimae, hence those tears.

People die, sure," my mother was saying. "But it's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.

Twelve years after Robin's death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard than they had on the day it happened.

Aristotle said in the poetics, that objects such as corpses, painful to view in themselves, can become delightful to contemplate in a work of art.

Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her – to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn't forget her – but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she'd stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket.

La gente muore, questo è un dato di fatto» diceva la mamma. «Ma il modo in cui perdiamo le cose è insensato e terribile. Per incuria. Incendi, guerre. Il Partenone utilizzato come un magazzino per le munizioni, ma ci pensi? Tutto ciò che sopravvive alla Storia dovrebbe essere considerato un miracolo.»

Bloodshed is a terrible thing, but the bloodiest parts of Homer and Aeschylus are often the most magnificent - for example, that glorious speech of Klytemnestra's in the Agamemnon that I love so much.

But it's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.

La gente muere, eso está claro. Pero la pérdida de ciertos objetos es tan trágica e innecesaria... Por puro descuido. En incendios y en guerras. Como el Partenón, que utilizaron como almacén de pólvora. Supongo que todo lo que logramos rescatar de la Historia es un milagro.

Sorry to hear about your Dad." He shrugged. "He was seventy, and we always told him fast food would kill him." "Heart attack?" "He was hit by a Pizza Express truck.

My mother and the men believed that being a good man is an art, and being a bad man is a tragedy, for the world as much as for those who depend on the tragic man in question.

Well, I think the great tragedy in American politics is what is legal, not what is illegal.