Quotes About Tragedy

There's no doubt that he'll be heading straight for tragedy. It will be beautiful, of course, but should he throw his whole life away as a sacrificial offering to such a fleeting beauty—like a bird in flight glimpsed from a window?

I was one of those savage marauders who, not knowing how to express their love, mistakenly kill the person they love.

For Ryuji the kiss was death, the very death in love he always dreamed of.

As long as he fought imaginary giants, Don Quixote was just play-acting. However once he actually kills someone, he will cling to his fantasies for all he is worth, because only they give meaning to his tragic misdeed. Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the more tenaciously we hold on to it, because we desperately want to give meaning to those sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused.

On 23 August 1572, French Catholics who stressed the importance of good deeds attacked communities of French Protestants who highlighted God's love for humankind. In this attack, the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours.

In the year 2000, wars caused the deaths of 310,000 individuals, and violent crime killed another 520,000. Each and every victim is a world destroyed, a family ruined, friends and relatives scarred for life. Yet from a macro perspective these 830,000 victims comprised only 1.5 per cent of the 56 million people who died in 2000. That year 1.26 million people died in car accidents (2.25 per cent of total mortality) and 815,000 people committed suicide (1.45 per cent).4

The figures for 2002 are even more surprising. Out of 57 million dead, only 172,000 people died in war and 569,000 died of violent crime (a total of 741,000 victims of human violence). In contrast, 873,000 people committed suicide.5 It turns out that in the year following the 9/11 attacks, despite all the talk of terrorism and war, the average person was more likely to kill himself than to be killed by a terrorist, a soldier or a drug dealer.

Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools. This ecological tragedy was restaged

Like a child in new boots leaping from puddle to puddle, this view sees history as leapfrogging from one bloodbath to the next, from World War One to World War Two to the Cold War, from the Armenian genocide to the Jewish genocide to the Rwandan genocide, from Robespierre to Lenin to Hitler.

How do you accept that tragic irony is a cruelty reserved not merely for Shakespearean plot twists? How do you admit to your son that monsters exist outside of fairy tales? How do you explain to a child something you can't understand yourself?

Oliver Wendell Holmes decía: "La mayor tragedia de América no es el gran desperdicio de recursos naturales, aunque esto ya es trágico. La mayor tragedia es el desperdicio de recursos humanos".

A writer's duty is to draw a picture that expresses more inner beauty, deeper anxiety, and more complex tragedy than a real character ever can.

Good poetry reveals the beauty of joy and tragedy.

My life's misery and tragedy is my wealth and splendor.

Never underestimate the importance of tragedy in life. Don't fear it, make it the mirror of your life.

The purpose of a writer is to show the beauty and tragedy of life in the reader's own mirror.

Tragedy admires man. Comedy feels a bit sorry for him.' We think we are kings or queens, masters of the universe or at least our own destiny. We forget that a foot may crush us, or that the wind may knock us down. We are not in control. We are subject to gas and sloughing skin and dirty pores. Most of our joints will eventually fail us. We have big brains which we can imagine great things, but we can't really get off the ground. It's like we have wings but we can't fly.

It's not natural to outlive your child. This has always been my greatest fear.

Generations crying out for meaning in their life, for something to believe in beyond themselves, and afraid or unable to embrace faith. Tragedy is all around us.

The planes struck, tearing through the curtain of that blue September morning, exposing the dark world that lay right behind it, of populations ruthlessly exploited, inflamed with hatred, and tired of waiting for change to happen by.

They were so pretty," she said. And then she died.

Of her six kids she'd buried all of her sons, the five young men having succumbed to the streets of Baltimore.

The Poet wipes her eyes on the corner of my tablecloth. 'Perhaps the modern tragedy, Lapinski, is that we weep and do not know what we are weeping for. This is quite different from catharsis.' She suddenly throws back her head and roars with laughter; her gold teeth rattle

One day during an event in which the Philistines were making sport of him, he stood between two temple pillars, prayed for one last infusion of supernatural strength, and literally brought the house down (see JUDGES 16). The collapsing structure killed him and more than 3000 spectators and government officials. This was the tragic end of a strong man who was weakened by a manipulative woman. Manipulation can destroy not only a relationship but also a person's life.