Quotes About Tragedy

Part of the answer is that Sandy Hook was a single event. The murders in Chicago are more of a steady background noise. We're constituted so that novel and unusual events catch our attention and trigger our emotional responses.

Inquisitor Hugo de Beniols had a number of prominent people burned alive at Toulouse, in 1275, among them Angèle, Lady of Labarthe, a woman of sixty-five years accused of sexual intercourse with Satan.

The Bible is the story of a love drama that looked as if it would end in tragedy—but then Jesus came.

The thin, sharp wires strung across the valley mouth sliced through his neck and sent the blood-spurting head bouncing like a ball amongst the loose shale.

Suddenly de Montfort went rigid and the ciborium slipped from his hand, dashing the white hosts like snowflakes onto the altar steps. The man's hand went out, pointing at the king, his usually skull-like face now almost cadaverous, the skin drawn tight, the eyes bulging. Corbett rose, his hand searching for the knife beneath his cloak. De Montfort's mouth opened and shut like a landed carp, then with a loud cry he fell headlong down the steps, his

Death brings release & removal from all evil, every tragedy & all difficulty. Death is not an enemy.

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.

The day after the British entered the war Henry James wrote a friend: The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness... is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.

So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past.So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us.Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy,the survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war.

I bet if big fat Henry hadn't been king, he wouldn't have had so many wives. He was a wicked man, but sad too, I suppose. How awful, to never find someone you could truly love, so you are always looking for her your whole life. And cutting people's heads off when they turn out to be the wrong one.

The tragedy of contemporary philosophy is that it has been castrated.

She went to Ed's body, and kneeled, dipped her finger in the sticky blood around his feet. With it, she drew a crude circle on her chest - it took several attempts - and a capital R inside the circle.

I'm always amazed to hear of air crash victims so badly mutilated that they have to be identified by their dental records. What I can't understand is, if they don't know who you are, how do they know who your dentist is?

I'm always amazed to hear of air crash victims so badly mutilated that they have to be identified by their dental records. What I can't understand is, if they don't know who you are, how do they know who your dentist is?

As Sandra now knows, her husband, Jim, received the heart of a young woman from New York. Her family said she was prone to depression throughout her life, was shy and soft-spoken, had worked part-time in a flower shop, and had taken her own life in despair over a lost love.

Greek tragedy operates through the ear. It is through the ear primarily that it enters the eyes, the senses, the mind, the heart. It must be spoken aloud. It is designed for that. And until that is done these plays have not been read, have not been used, have not been born.

She simply could not imagine lives ending so soon. Oh, you poor young men, she thought wildly.

Beings die in war. That is the price that must be paid

There was nothing to imagine with a gun except something that was dead.

How did he die?' 'He shot himself with an Italian pistol he'd bought in Rome just before he married her.

The worst description I ever read was by a best-selling novelist who sized up World War II this way: "The war was just terrible.

There was plenty of room for magic in any race, too, for chance and for grit, for tragedy, if an animal went down, for unexpected reversals at the tape. I had always loved all of it—even what couldn't be controlled or predicted.

My mother in that awful parking lot, dead on Christmas Day. Jenny's murder and Eden's cancer. Hap's disappearance. My daughter's accident. The dark abyss of my work and how it connects in an awful and yawning way to everything else.

Americans are not comfortable with tragedy. Because of its insolubility. Tragedy is not amenable to reason and we are fixers, aren't we? We can fix everything.