Tragedy Quotes

...this two-way hatred. I don’t understand it. I wonder how much of it is caused by fear?

~ Judy Blume

Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of DenmarkIs by a forged process of my deathRankly abused: but know, thou noble youth,The serpent that did sting thy father's lifeNow wears his crown.

~ William Shakespeare

LARRY--(with increasing bitter intensity, more as if he were fighting with himself than with Hickey) I'm afraid to live, am I?--and even more afraid to die! So I sit here, with my pride drowned on the bottom of a bottle, keeping drunk so I won't see myself shaking in my britches with fright, or hear myself whining and praying: Beloved Christ, let me live a little longer at any price! If it's only for a few days more, or a few hours even, have mercy, Almighty God, and let me still clutch greedily to my yellow heart this sweet treasure, this jewel beyond price, the dirty, stinking bit of withered old flesh which is my beautiful little life! (He laughs with a sneering, vindictive self-loathing, staring inward at himself with contempt and hatred. Then abruptly he makes Hickey again the antagonist.) You think you'll make me admit that to myself?

~ Eugene O'neill

You and I were meant to be together, even if we weren't meant to be happy.

~ Stacey T. Hunt

Time shall unfold what pleated cunning hides: Who cover faults, at last shame them derides.

~ William Shakespeare

And there it was, on a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd of ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied, that Griffin, the first of all men to make himself invisible, Griffin, the most gifted physicist the world has ever seen, ended in infinite disaster his strange and terrible career.

~ H.g. Wells

Tragedies break us, yet sometimes they make us.

~ Nihar Sharma

Sometimes the worst beatings we endure are never the physical kind.

~ Dannika Dark

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in suchan inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, theirabsolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lackof style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give usan impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements ofbeauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, thewhole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenlywe find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of theplay. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonderof the spectacle enthralls us.

~ Oscar Wilde

He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Come what come may, time and the hour run through the roughest day.

~ William Shakespeare

And those who only know the non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such love there can be no sort of tragedy.

~ Leo Tolstoy

The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.

~ Terri Garey

Humor is tragedy plus time.

~ Mark Twain

Tragedy is when someone ends up dead. Everything else is just a bump in the road. For the record, that was something Daddy used to say.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

A person’s tragedy does not make up their entire life. A story carves deep grooves into our brains each time we tell it. But we aren't one story. We can change our stories. We can write our own.

~ Amy Poehler

Great tragedies have great consequences. They ripple through the fabric of this world and the next. When the loss is too great for either world to bear, Everlost absorbs the shock, like a cushion between the two.

~ Neal Shusterman

Young men's love then lies not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.

~ William Shakespeare

The best thing you can say to someone going through a tragic loss is not thatIt's going to be alrightIt is:Hold on tight because this is going to hurt like hell.

~ Johna Passaro

I felt I was drawing close to that age, that place in life, where you realize one day what you'd told yourself was a Zen detachment turns out to be naked fear. You'd had one serious love relationship in your life and it had ended in tragedy, and the tragedy had broken something inside you. But instead of trying to repair the broken place, or at least really stop and look at it, you skated and joked. You had friends, you were a decent citizen. You hurt no one. And your life was somehow just about half of what it could be.

~ Roland Merullo

People know your tragedies and they treat you like you’re not human. Like you’re a three-headed goat. A monster from some other planet. They keep reminding you of your pain. You see how they look at me? They’re stuck on that person I used to be. They can’t see that old life as just a moment in time that I’ve moved on from. It was a horrible life.

~ Eric Jerome Dickey

What give all that is tragic, whatever its form, the characteristic of the sublime, is the first inkling of the knowledge that the world and life can give no satisfaction, and are not worth our investment in them. The tragic spirit consists in this. Accordingly it leads to resignation.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

She gave me for my pains a world of sighs.

~ William Shakespeare

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course—for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.

~ C.g. Jung

On a sunny Tuesday - for it seems so many awful things happen on a Tuesday - six astronauts and one schoolteacher attempted to pierce the sky. Instead they touched the stars.

~ Neal Shusterman

I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream...

~ Black Elk

Then she gave one last burst of music. The white Moon heard it, and she forgot the dawn, and lingered on in the sky. The red rose heard it, and it trembled all over with ecstasy, and opened its petals to the cold morning air. Echo bore it to her purple cavern in the hills, and woke the sleeping shepherds from their dreams. It floated through the reeds of the river, and they carried its message to the sea.

~ Oscar Wilde

If she was broken, she would slash him with her jagged edges, reckless as a drunkard with a shattered bottle.

~ Diana Gabaldon

Finish, good lady; the bright day is done, And we are for the Dark. (Act 5, Scene 2)

~ William Shakespeare

I had hoped that the rest of the world would stand still while I got myself together again, but Chaos and Tragedy had marched into other lives close to mine as well.

~ Julie Metz

I don't really wanna know what makes you leave, or when you'll be back.I just wanna know what will make me cry at your arrival.

~ Ade Santi

...our family became a place where you screamed for help but no one heard, not ever.

~ Marceline Loridan-Ivens

Her first reaction was one of hope, because his eyes were open and shining with a radiant light she had never seen there before. She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had love him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past. But she had to give in to the intransigence of death. (Love in the Time of Cholera)

~ Gabriel García Márquez

One hardly need believe that the events in your life are actually planned as bolts from the blue, sent special delivery from a deity who is testing and training you like a lab rat! And that is what we are saying when we fretfully ask, What can God be trying to teach me through this tragedy?

~ Robert M. Price

Love can be a very frightening thing.”“That is why most great love stories are tragedies.

~ Agatha Christie

Receive what cheer you may. The night is long that never finds the day.

~ William Shakespeare

What art thou Faustus, but a man condemned to die?

~ Christopher Marlowe

As a lord was heldfor the strength of his body and stoutness of heart.Much lore he learned, and loved wisdombut fortune followed him in few desires;oft wrong and awry what he wrought turned;what he loved he lost, what he longed for he won not;and full friendship he found not easily,nor was lightly loved for his looks were sad.He was gloom-hearted, and glad seldomfor the sundering sorrow that filled his youth...(On Turin Turambar - The Children of Hurin)

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

The world exists on thousands of different levels and just because some are more tragic than others, it doesn't make them any more valid. You fall into that way of thinking and you become so overwhelmed by the world's suffering, you go mad.

~ Bella Pollen

TEIRESIAS: Alas, how terrible is wisdom whenit brings no profit to the man that's wise!This I knew well, but had forgotten it,else I would not have come here.

~ Sophocles