Quotes About Tragedy

When the evening began, Fouquet was at the top of the world. By the time it had ended, he was at the bottom. Voltaire, 1694-1778

He had seen photographs of people whose tragedies had turned their faces to transparent glass, had even taken a few: survivors of house fires and hunting accidents whose grief was distinguished by a wide-open compassion that extended outward in every direction.

Kabul is... a thousand tragedies per square mile.

Sea Prayer was inspired by the story of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach the Safety in Europe in 2015. In the year after Alan's death, 4,176 others died or went missing attempting that same journey.

What I have in ample supply here is children who've lost their childhood. But the tragedy is that these are the lucky ones.

Kabul is . . ." Idris searches for the right words. "A thousand tragedies per square mile.

Sad stories make good books.

marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief.

His parents were executed in the street. The neighbors saw it. You have death certificates? - Death certificates? This is Afghanistan we're talking about. Most people there don't have birth certificates.

Giti was killed, collecting pieces of her daughter's flesh in an apron, screeching hysterically. Giti's decomposing right foot, still in its nylon sock and purple sneaker, would be found on a rooftop two weeks later. At Giti's fatiha, the day after the killings, Laila sat stunned in a roomful of weeping women. This was the first time that someone whom Laila had known, been close to, loved, had died.

Too many young Afghan men are dying this way.

Las malas hierbas del desierto siguen con vida, pero la flor de primavera florece y se marchita. Qué gracia, qué dignidad, qué tragedia.

Buruienile desertului isi duc mai departe traiul, dar florile de primavara infloresc si se ofilesc. Atata gratie, atata demnitate, ce tragedie!

A lot of kids died. Dysentery, TB, hunger—you name it. Mostly, that damn dysentery. God, Laila. I saw so many kids buried. There's nothing worse a person can see.

The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.' Such grace, such dignity, such a tragedy.

Sad stories make good books," she said.

According to the Hindus, the Muslims were to blame. The fact is, both sides killed. Both shot and stabbed and speared and clubbed. Both tortured. Both raped.

it looked like the great heat wave would be like mass shootings in the United States— mourned by all, deplored by all, and then immediately forgotten or superseded by the next one, until they came in a daily drumbeat and became the new normal.

It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century's war dead.

at the end of every month or two . . ., the British had a whole Vietnam Memorial's worth of dead. Every month or two, for 51 months.

A Vietnam Memorial's worth of civilians in an instantaneous flash. . . . When the crew of the Enola Gay landed, they celebrated with a barbeque.

causing a refugee crisis rated at ten thousand katrinas. One

And now India had paid the price. More people had died in this heat wave than in the entirety of the First World War, and all in a single week and in a single region of the world. The stain of such a crime would never go away, it would remain forever.

Rather than admire the mediocre great men over whom passersby nudge each other in awe, I venerate the young, unknown geniuses who die in their teens, their souls shattered - delicate, phosphorescent glowworms that one must see to know they really did exist.