Tragedy Quotes

I followed many conversations about what happened in Norway and the death of Amy Winehouse because they happened one after the next. Too many of those conversations tried to conflate the two events, tried to create some kind of hierarchy of tragedy, grief, call, response. There was so much judgment, so much interrogation of grief—how dare we mourn a singer, an entertainer, a girl-woman who struggled with addiction, as if the life of an addict is somehow less worthy a life, as if we are not entitled to mourn unless the tragedy happens to the right kind of people. How dare we mourn a singer when across an ocean seventy-seven people are dead? We are asked these questions as if we only have the capacity to mourn one tragedy at a time, as if we must measure the depth and reach of a tragedy before deciding how to respond, as if compassion and kindness are finite resources we must use sparingly. We cannot put these two tragedies on a chart and connect them with a straight line. We cannot understand these tragedies neatly.

~ Roxane Gay

Pattie saw grief. Her eyes focused on a version of her own young self, and so many other children in Vietnam who grew up without parents, some abandoned because of their ethnicity, others because of tragedy. And her arms reached out wide.

~ Holly Goldberg Sloan

Sorry. Don't need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or of joy. The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.

~ Alan Lightman

That was the day my whole world went black. Air looked black. Sun looked black. I laid up in bed and stared at the black walls of my house….Took three months before I even looked out the window, see the world still there. I was surprised to see the world didn’t stop.

~ Kathryn Stockett

It's like a Venn diagram of tragedy.

~ Sara Zarr

Who hasn't walked through a life of small tragedies?

~ Jacqueline Woodson

It was only in the middle—between the immense and the minute—that sadness seemed to exist.

~ Alex Latimer

To all the person whom I made laugh,I wonder who will be the one to put a smile on my face-a clown's message

~ Johncen-K.m.f Vergara

Because I want to know if I'm allowed to kiss your tears away. Because I want to be able to hold your hand. Because I like you.

~ J.b. Mcgee

I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy — why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tragic tales rarely do make sense.

~ Gwenn Wright

Hands that never touch. Lips that never meet. The Almost Lovers, never to be.

~ Rae Hachton

She knew for a fact that she wasn't going to sit around and wait for some miracle to happen. She wasn't going to watch the storm in front of her and pretend like nothing had happened. Yes, Allah is expecting her to be patient and keep on marching forward

~ Diyar Harraz

The seed of an urban legend find fertile soil at the corner of tragedy and imagination.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

The kind of death you should mourn over is the one that happen when you abort your potentials prematurely! Life without purpose is a tragedy!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Failure becomes success when it finds positive minds; Tragedy becomes melody when it lands in positive hands. With positivity, possibility is assured!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

The greatest tragedy to ever happen to a nation is not the incidences of war or terrorism. It's when more bookshops close down and more drinking bars are opened to replace them!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Waiters and quitters have a little difference; quitters begin well but do not finish it; waiters do not begin it at all. Don’t be part of their tragedy. Go, make it happen now!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Talkatives complain, cry, shout, brag, and are more hysterical about their lives than something else; don’t be a part of that tragedy! Perhaps it's been a while now that you have been complaining, crying and shouting about your labour pains. It's time to show us your baby!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

For a dream to die, something so tragic would have definitely gone wrong! Be careful you don’t kill your own dreams.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

For there has never been a story nearly as tragic as the one of Frankenstein, except for that of Johnny Heart and his Francesca Valentine.

~ Rae Hachton

It didn’t take tragedy or war to derail a man. It took only a memory.

~ Ali Shaw

I know now that what is tragic isn’t the moment. It is the memory.

~ Jacqueline Woodson

We can free ourselves from the old stories that have reduced us & allow real love for ourselves to blossom.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Touching him is familiar and unfamiliar. We have been here before. Also we have never been here before.

~ E. Lockhart

Time, the thing we can't beat back... Yet, time is also what it takes to heal, what it takes for certain memory cells to die. Maybe time doesn't heal. Maybe it doesn't even pass. We pass through time, and come out stunned, so rage, and memory, are blurred.

~ Kiana Davenport

When you make a film, if you are an insider, you're usually the last person to know that your film is not right. But when you are an outsider, you have a little more objectivity.I think a part of my success is that I am naturally objective. I am not an insider.In many ways, Anupama is the same.Foreword, First Day First Show

~ Shah Rukh Khan

If sickness brought glory God, Jesus would have spread disease, not healed it.

~ D.r. Silva

... the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both...

~ Frederick Buechner

Death is a tragedy whether it is in the death of one girl-woman in London or seventy-seven men, women, and children in Norway. We know this, but perhaps it needs to be said over and over again so we do not forget.I have never considered compassion a finite resource. I would not want to live in a world where such was the case.

~ Roxane Gay

Nothing has changed, Claire. You're still as beautiful as you were when we met first and I am still in love with everything about you. We may be worlds apart but this doesn't keep our hearts at distance. I feel your breath in every breath of mine and I hear your heartbeat in every beat of my heart. I traveled to far away lands, rivers, forests, mountains, glaciers, deserts and skyscrapers but wherever I go I find you there. My dreams aren't illusions but visions of a beautiful yesterday; I play with your hair-locks, I kiss your eyes, I embrace your hands and you giggle in my arms blossoming like a flower. My love, you're my only reality, my only fantasy, my only celebration and my only refuge. I have waited a thousands suns and I can wait a thousand more to witness the moment you call out to me. That day you'll find me and even if I don't live up to see that day I will be with you forever, just remember me.

~ Huseyn Raza

The whiskey was a good start. I got the idea from Dylan Thomas. He's this poet who drank twenty-one straight whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern in New York and then died on the spot from alcohol poisoning. I've always wanted to hear the bartender's side of the story. What was it like watching this guy drink himself out of here? How did it feel handing him number twenty-one and watching his face crumple up before the fall of the stool? And did he already have number twenty-two poured, waiting for this big fat tip, and then have to drink it himself after whoever came took the body away?

~ Michael Thomas Ford

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

~ Debasish Mridha

I have accumulated a wealth of knowledge in innumerable spheres and enjoyed it as an always ready instrument for exercising the mind and penetrating further and further. Best of all, mine has been a life of loving and being loved. What a tragedy that all this will disappear with the used-up body!

~ Richard Goldschmidt

What an ironic tragedy that an affluent, “Christian” minority in the world continues to hoard its wealth while hundreds of millions of people hover on the edge of starvation!

~ Ronald J. Sider

The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.

~ Alan Lightman

It bothered me that whatever was waiting wasn't waiting for me

~ Jean Anouilh

darkness falls upon Humanityand faces become terriblethingsthat wanted more than therewas.all our days are marked withunexpectedaffronts - somedisastrous, othersless sobut the process iswearing andcontinuous.attrition rules.most givewayleavingempty spaceswhere people shouldbe.and nowas we ready to self-destructthere is very little left tokillwhich makes the tragedyless and moremuch muchmore.

~ Charles Bukowski

The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear.

~ Charles Baudelaire