Quotes About Tragedy

In the West, it was believed that attitude and ambition saved you. In Africa, we had learned that no one was immune to capricious tragedy.

Before the Great Chicago Fire, no one took notice of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary, two Irish immigrants who lived with their five children on the city's West Side.

A lot of people say to me, 'Is this good, to do to a Shakespeare piece?' And I think, 'You know, 'West Side Story' did it very cleverly, in a different way.' But if you look at 'Bonnie and Clyde,' 'Titanic,' 'Avatar,' 'Grease,' 'Brokeback Mountain'... they're all 'Romeo and Juliet' stories.

I grew up in a small town in West Virginia called Kenova. It's the city where the plane crashed from Marshall University. I watched the mountain burn, and my cousins were the volunteer firemen. I was 6 years old at the time.

It'd be impossible to capture the feel of 'All Quiet on the Western Front' in a novel starring Mace Windu; 'All Quiet' is a tragic coming-of-age story.

Then I heard another shot which hit him right in the head, over here, and his head practically opened up and a lot of blood and many more things came out.

It is something you can't predict, and it is the huge sadness in your life, losing a child.

I think if my child died I would prefer it if I were dead.

When I decided to become a doctor, I was very, very young, when my mother, her seventh child, became pregnant, and she was feeling terrible pain, and I could not know how to help her. And my mother died in front of my eyes, without knowing why, which diagnosis. So I decided to be a doctor.

I think Americans are not guilty for 9/11; I think President Bush is not guilty for 9/11.

President Obama was deeply and clearly affected by the Sandy Hook disaster.

In my lifetime, we have lost a President, a Civil Rights leader and a Presidential candidate - all to gun violence.

War is about dead people.

Words do not pay for my dead people.

For me, people are like the black boxes found in the debris of airplane crashes.

After September 11, I got to understand a little bit of his deep love for this country.

'The Descendants' somehow made death and adultery funny at times.

There's this classic car crash thing about 'Macbeth.' You can just see this car driving at 100 mph towards this brick wall, and you can't do anything about it, and the characters are desperately trying to stop it and can't.

I admire people who destroy themselves.

Nobody destroys people - people destroy themselves, and it's very, very sad.

People kill for love. They die for love.

My own child, one of them, died of AIDS. A brilliant boy.

My second wife, the mother of one of my sons, died of murder. I was not with her, but I could have saved her. I think.

Here are also the two vessels, but the San Carlos without sailors, all having died of the scurvy, except two.