Quotes About Tragedy

Mum had worshipped Princess Di and frequently lamented her passing. "Gone," she would say, shaking her head in disbelief. "Just like that. All that exercise for nothing." Diana-worship was the nearest thing Mum had to a religion.

That was the good thing about Julia, her family background was even more fucked up than his. They were a pair of freakishly bereaved people.

When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease - of the joy that kills.

It is a horrible, terrible thing, the worst thing, to watch somebody you love die right in front of you and not be able to do nothing about it.

That was the thing about tragedy. It was just sitting there, keeping you company, waiting. And you had absolutely no idea.

There is nothing worse than war in the summetime.

But, reader, we must not forget that Kind Phillip loved the queen and that without her, he was lost. This is the danger of loving: No matter how powerful you are, no matter how many kingdoms you rule, you cannot stop those you love from dying.

But, deep in her heart she knew more than what the words read or heard seemed to say. She knew that every letter in every word in every war bulletin was, somewhere, first written in blood of men, of human beings, who had once smiled and sung songs, eaten, drunk, slept and loved.

I had a cousin, Randall, killed on Iwo Jima. Have I told you? Have I told you his was a beautiful smile? Not the smile of a cynic, nor the easy, hungry smile of boys his age, whose smiles that aim to get them somewhere, are a commodity in exchange for God knows what. No. His was completely without intent; an accident of a smile. The kind of smile that would have surprised him if he could have seen it for himself. But he was too young to know his own extraordinariness.

Life can be wildly tragic at times, and I've had my share. But whatever happens to you, you have to keep a slightly comic attitude. In the final analysis, you have got not to forget to laugh.

Brenda's pouting voice broke in, "Your girl friend's dead, and Momma thought you was dead, too.

The infamous "Rape of Nanking" that occurred not long afterward, just 102 miles farther north, tells a story of what might have happened at my childhood home were it not for that commander.

This story is about John, who was a private in the 2nd Georgia Battalion Infantry. I had always been told that John had taken part in Pickett's Charge, the bloody assault on Cemetery Ridge on July 3, 1863. Actually he was mortally wounded very close to Cemetery Hill on July 2 the day before that tragic charge.

He didn't want to die. He had hardly begun to live.

One of the novels that was hardest for me to write had to deal with the horrible slaughter of war. I almost didn't finish Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom for just that reason.

Our high school suffered a huge loss of life. But as awful as the tsunami was, good things actually came of it. We learned that out there on the ocean, there's no such thing as popular kids and unpopular kids. We were all equal and all valuable.

When Salter was fifty-five, his twenty-five-year-old daughter, Allan, died in an electrical accident. She was in the shower in a cabin next door to his in Aspen. He walked in and found her lying naked on the floor, the water running. He carried her dead body in his arms. He took her outside and tried to resuscitate her, somehow thinking she was drowning. We do not talk about this. He says only, "There was the wreckage of that.

3,117 people had lost their lives in the flood. And the king had missed breakfast

That such a final, tragic, and awful thing is suicide can exist in the midst of remarkable beauty is one of the vastly contradictory and paradoxical aspects of life and art.

The disease that has, on several occasions, nearly killed me does kill tens of thousands of people every year: most are young, most die unnecessarily, and many are among the most imaginative and gifted that we as a society have.

Within psychiatric circles, if you kill yourself, you earn the right to be considered a "successful" suicide. This is a success one can live without.

Of course, it is tragic that so many of his generation died as they did, but why must he harbour such bitterness for his elders?

It was bad luck for poor old Tommy.

Keiko, unlike Niki was pure Japanese, and more than one newspaper was quick to pick up on this fact. The English are fond of their idea that our race has an instinct for suicide, as if further explanations are unnecessary; for that was all they reported, that she was Japanese and that she had hung herself in her room.