Quotes About Tragedy

There's always a sense of tragedy with icons. It happened to both the Princess of Wales and Diana Dors. A lot of people had grown up with them, and everybody loved them. Then, when they had at last found happiness, they were taken in the most dreadful way.

Often, contrasts bring art to life: the bright speck of paint on a dark canvas; the tightrope walk between humor and tragedy.

I went to pick my son up from school and walked him back and was in the house preparing dinner, and he came in the house and gave me this flower of chrysanthemum that was full of ants. And he went back out to play and ran out into the street and got hit by a car. The car happened to be driven by a LAPD detective.

Theses officers were good friends, so it must have been a terrible argument, because the one who played chess with my father was so angry that he walked over to the dentist's house and got the dentist out of bed and shot him.

At the age of two-and-a-half, I was run down by a truck. I had gone rogue in the house while my mother was bathing my sister. I went outside and met a friend who promised me candy. Afterward, I walked back by myself across the road where I fell down in the street. A 15-year-old boy delivering bread struck me down.

People were watching the TV set, and they said three rock-and-rollers died - Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, The Big Bopper, including the pilot. I walked out of the hotel. I got on the bus alone. Their clothes were hanging on the racks, their guitars on the seats.

When John Coltrane passed, we were in the church for the memorial. Albert Ayler came walking in playing, real out there. He was actually mourning through his horn. Mourning, but it was also like a call to wake up. Wake up!

It's a tremendous feeling walking on to a set with a live audience and making them laugh, but I love drama, and I love drama where there's the ability to bring comedy into it because in a lot of tragic circumstances in life there is comedy to be had.

After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.

I had to tell the city that 2Pac passed, and I had to be on the radio early after Biggie passed. Those were awful, emotional.

Sept. 11, 2001, still feels like a blur to me. I wish it were simply a bad, re-occurring dream, but unfortunately it isn't.

When those four bombs fell, I was in the middle and I should have died.

I lost my mum to breast cancer and my dad has beaten bowel cancer.

It was a lot of fun in the back of that bus with Ritchie Valens, Buddy and The Big Bopper sharing each other's songs.

I was born into an Irish Catholic family in the New York area in this great, wonderful, and safe country, but the Holocaust has always haunted me, and it has long stood as a stumbling block to faith. How could such a thing be? How is that consistent with the concept of a loving God?

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I rushed home before the kids left for school and gathered them around our dining room table and told them what had happened. Like everyone else, we struggled for words to describe to our kids why such a thing would occur.

When I die, it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it.

Two of my grandparents died in a car crash. Sucks, 'cause they would have lived to a hundred.

Prodigy was definitely family... It definitely sucks not to have him here.

All of a sudden their husband's dead and maybe a child is dead and they have absolutely nothing - and they're heading through the desert at night.

Things went topsy-turvy when two of my dogs died all of a sudden due to a parvovirus attack.

My grandparents had died in 1983, and suddenly my brother is out jogging before Mass, and he dies.

Young Jimmy Dean fell off the world as suddenly as he had come.

It is because my dad died suddenly that I became an actor. I thought, I'm going to make money doing this thing I enjoy.