Tragedy Quotes

If she’s gonna love again, it won’t be an eternity but a hard, fast conflagration that leaves everyone else in the embers.

~ Lindsay Detwiler

How one tragedy affects so many others.

~ Kenneth Eade

We wear the mask that grins and lies.It shades our cheeks and hides our eyes.This debt we pay to human guileWith torn and bleeding hearts…We smile and mouth the myriad subtleties.Why should the world think otherwiseIn counting all our tears and sighs.Nay let them only see us whileWe wear the mask.

~ Maya Angelou

Like so many of our neighbors who latched onto tragedy to stand out from the crowd -- slavery, incest, a suicide -- I had exaggerated the ethnic chip on my shoulder for effect. I've learned since that tragedy is not to be hoarded. Only the untouched, the well-fed and contented, could possibly covet suffering like a designer jacket. I'd readily donate my story to the Salvation Army so that some other frump in need of color could wear it away.

~ Lionel Shriver

I wish I could read a couple of thousand words a day. Words written by someone else for a change!

~ A. Louise Robertson

You're the hunter, the warrior. You're stronger than anyone else here, that's your tragedy.

~ Anne Rice

Tragedy has a cruel way of ripping off the masks of self-sufficiency and self-satisfaction. It yells in the streets, No! Everything is not A-okay! It cracks apart our airtight theologies about God having everything under control. It forces us to get real and really struggle with the big questions of life. It cautions us that this life journey we are on is not easily comprehended with a few sermon points but demands a lifetime of wisdom to even begin to fathom.

~ David Brazzeal

It's easier, somehow, if there's a reason for tragedy - lust or jealousy or hatred or revenge. We can find in these explanations an emotional tenor commensurate with the gravity of the act. There's something we recognize as human, a motive toward which we can direct our rage but can also understand, at some primal level, as an extension of ourselves.

~ Leslie Jamison

How beautiful the tragic seems when it is beneath a mask, but when it appears so nakedly before me and... when I am so forcibly implicated... I don't know whether I care for it so much. Somehow or other it is as though I were torturing myself.(Thirty-Three Abominations)

~ Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal

At the beginning of the war…I had to look in on the War Office, and in a room I found a fellow…What do you think he was doing…what the hell do you think he was doing? He was devising the ceremonial for the disbanding of a Kitchener battalion. You can’t say we were not prepared in one matter at least…. Well, the end of the show was to be: the adjutant would stand the battalion at ease; the band would play Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant would say: There will be no more parades…. Don’t you see how symbolical it was—the band playing Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant saying: There will be no more parades?…For there won’t. There won’t, there damn well won’t. No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country…nor for the world, I dare say… None… Gone… Napoo finny! No…more…parades!

~ Ford Madox Ford

Natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial. The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers. Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.

~ Garrett Hardin

The tragedy of unfulfilling life is that you're already dead but no one pronounced you dead...

~ Assegid Habtewold

I don't like feeling sorry for myself. That's not who I am. And most of the time I don't feel that way. Instead, I am grateful for having at least found you. We could have flashed by one another like two pieces of cosmic dust.God or the universe or whatever one chooses to label the great systems of balance and order does not recognize Earth-time. To the universe, four days is no different than four billion light years. I try to keep that in mind.But, I am, after all, a man. And all the philosophic rationalizations I can conjure up do not keep me from wanting you, every day, every moment, the merciless wail of time, of time I can never spend with you, deep within my head.I love you, profoundly and completely. And I always will.The last cowboy,Robert

~ Robert James Waller

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

~ Debasish Mridha

When something is tragic you never really forget it.

~ Sophia Olson

Americans refused to see accidents as accidental. They did not comprehend they while tragedy always exacts a formidable price, it rarely incurs a debt.

~ Julia Glass

When tragedy comes like this, at first it is complete. You do not need to think it over, or decide what it means. For it is far ahead of you, and the very act of acknowledging it means letting it go. But then it comes round again - and it goes through you and is worse than before.

~ Benjamin Lytal

I can’t imagine that I’m supposed to get over it , like hopping a low stone wall; if Thursday was a barrier of some kind, it was made of razor wire, which I did not bound over but thrash through, leaving me in flayed pieces and on the other side of something only in a temporal sense.

~ Lionel Shriver

Death is only tragic if you have tragically wasted your life on meaninglessness.

~ Jason A. Heisey

But when you realize that the story of your life could be told a thousand different ways, that you could tell it over and over as a tragedy, but you choose to call it an epic, that's when you start to learn what celebration is. When what you see in front of you is so far outside of what you dreamed, but you have the belief, the boldness, the courage to call it beautiful instead of calling it wrong, that's celebration.

~ Shauna Niequist

We conform to pain until we don't notice it anymore, it's what you call — numb — and it tragically blots out our pleasure too.

~ Bryant Mcgill

If your life is like a tragedy it is because you have been neglecting something — most likely yourself.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter; dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty, beyond waht can be valued, rich or rare; no less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor; as much as child e'er loved, or father found; a love that makes breath poor, and speech unable; beyond all manner of so much I love you.

~ William Shakespeare

The quotation falsely attributed to Stalin, 'One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,' gets the numbers wrong but captures a real fact about human psychology. (p. 220)

~ Steven Pinker

The afternoon light brightening the green in her eyes, her tan skin the last memory of fall

~ John Green

Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least, nor are those empty-hearted whose low sounds reverb no hollowness.

~ William Shakespeare

I profess myself an enemy to all other joys, which the most precious square of sense possesses, and find I am alone felicitate in your dear highness love.

~ William Shakespeare

This is why some relationships look so beautiful and some look so tragic — beauty belongs to the thoughtful, tragedy to the neglectful.

~ Bryant Mcgill

The world is not what it is supposed to be. We are tragically off course.

~ Bryant Mcgill

It is tragic the way fearful people put all of their fears and insecurities into others, the way they strangle their dreams — often in the name of love.

~ Bryant Mcgill

The tragedy of Hetty is a ‘collide’26 between the free will and male dominant society or nobility27 or religion. If her conduct is bad and cause of her tragedy then where is the tragedy of A.D. So as a moralist, GE demands a way for ‘Hetty like human beings’ in set society. says Bhutta

~ M.k. Bhutta

The tragedy of Hetty is a ‘collide’ between the free will and male dominant society or nobility or religion. If her conduct is bad and cause of her tragedy then where is the tragedy of A.D. So as a moralist, GE demands a way for ‘Hetty like human beings’ in set society.

~ M.k. Bhutta

I have not broken your heart - you have broken it - and in breaking it, you have broken mine ... I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer - but yours! How can I?

~ Emily Brontë

I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer - but yours! How can I?

~ Emily Brontë

The tragic hero usurps the function of the gods and attempts to remake the world.

~ Helen Gardner

All terrible things are more terrible if they give us no chance of retrieving a blunder—either no chance at all, or only one that depends on our enemies and not ourselves. Those things are also worse which we cannot, or cannot easily, help. Speaking generally, anything causes us to feel fear that when it happens to, or threatens, others causes us to feel pity.

~ Aristotle

When I was a teenager in Boston, a man on the subway handed me a card printed with tiny pictures of hands spelling out the alphabet in sign language. I AM DEAF, said the card. You were supposed to give the man some money in exchange. I have thought of that card ever since, during difficult times, mine or someone else's; surely when tragedy has struck you dumb, you should be given a stack of cards that explain it for you. When Pudding died, I wanted my stack. I still want it. My first child was stillborn, it would say on the front. It remains the hardest thing for me to explain, even now, or maybe I mean especially now - now that his death feels like a non sequitur. My first child was stillborn. I want people to know but I don't want to say it aloud. People don't like to hear it but I think they might not mind reading it on a card.

~ Elizabeth Mccracken

...I like to see things through the lens of Greek tragedy, which teaches us, among other things, that real tragedy is never a straightforward confrontation between Good and Evil, but is rather much more exquisitely and much more agonizingly, a conflict between two irreconcilable views of the world.

~ Daniel Mendelsohn

For a moment, blake said nothing. After chewing on her venom for a moment, he shrugged. I would rather hate you for who I am than love me for who I am not

~ Tanya Kaley

The tragedy of life is that sometimes we get what we want.

~ W. Somerset Maugham