Quotes About Tragedy

One is reminded of Primo Levi's observation about the Holocaust: 'Things whose existence is not morally comprehensible cannot exist.

It's so easy to for tragedy to defeat you. It's seductive in the way that I heard freezing to death is. Being consumed by grief is in many ways much more comfortable than battling your way out of it - especially when you realize that no matter how hard you fight you can't reverse the situation you're grieving over. But it's so important to engage in the battle anyway. It's really the only way to stay alive.

The rescue of the hostages, so far away from home, is about to become legend. But it has exacted a price: three of the hostages have died in the firefight. As has one soldier, Lieutenant-Colonel Yoni Netanyahu, brother of future Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Everybody knows about Pearl Harbor. The thing that really fascinated me is that through this tragedy there was this amazing American heroism.

One accident that kills, say, 10 people gets far more attention than 10 accidents that kill 1 each. The 876 people each year who die on US tracks usually have little publicity, but imagine if they all occurred at once. . . .

On September 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked "What God do you pray to?" "What beliefs do you hold?"

we had bypassed Romeo and Juliet and gone straight to Macbeth.

be a dead fool. She braced for the crash, sad that her brother and parents would never know what happened

She knew many survivors of the Holocaust. She said that for some, their experience destroyed their faith in a good God. Others believed more deeply than ever.

To be known for one's saddest story is not the road to notoriety anyone would willingly choose.

Once again the lake slammed through the dike like a truck driving through puddling, sending a fifteen-foot-high tsunami through the upper Glades, drawing the towns of Miami Locks, South Bay, Chosen, Pahokee, and Belle Glade, where the Glades Hotel was the only building left standing after the storm.

love and honesty are the path to redemption and fulfillment, anything else leads ultimately to tragedy.

Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat, said, "This war was launched without an imminent threat to our families…. Radical 'know it all' ideologues here in Washington bent facts, distorted intelligence, and perpetrated lies designed to mislead the American people into believing that a third-rate thug had a hand in the 9/11 tragedy and was soon to unleash a mushroom cloud.

No matter who won this battle, a race would be wiped out.

What in the world could this family have done to deserve a fate such as this?

Even those who die in terrorist attacks, and have thus had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, are described as "heroes", though given a choice most of them would no doubt have preferred to be somewhere else when the blow was struck.

Tacitus informs us for example that after murdering his wife Poppaea in 65 AD, Nero used a year's supply of Rome's cinnamon to bury her.

Lewinska is one of three examples he describes; the others are of Jewish mothers at Auschwitz and Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Meisels and his Hasidim in Buchenwald; see To Mend the World, 216–219.

He wrote about this claim, that the evils of Auschwitz could not be assimilated into the Hegelian system and hence by implication by any philosophical thought and indeed by any thought at all, briefly in his book The Religious Dimension of Hegel's Thought, published in 1968, and then again in an essay, "Would Hegel Today Be a Hegelian?

Is she dead?" called Zenda. Sort of," I shouted, "And the pizza's completely fucked too.

The only choice once your world has been torn apart is to find your genius and live with that. 'Normal' is out of the question. The healing for veterans, or anyone going through great tragedy, is finding your natural spirit and your genius that was waiting to be found. That can now become the cohering principle in your life. The idea of patching someone up and back into normal when they've had extremely abnormal experiences is a misunderstanding.

Sometimes, the greatest safety can be found in taking the right risk. Whether it be an individual, a community or a country, when faced with tragedy or fearful uncertainty, we either become bigger and enter life more fully, or else we accept a diminished life and resign ourselves to a smaller way of being.

They fight a war and they don't know what for. Isn't that crazy? How can one man kill another and not really know the reason why he does it, except that the other man wears a different color uniform and speaks a different language?

Many people looking back on the effects of tragedy in their lives conclude that there was nothing else that would have been a strong enough motivation to change—that the most extreme suffering was needed to drive them toward their soul's mission.