Tragedy Quotes

No god will spare you forgiveness for loving me.

Today, a couple with 'just married' tags collided head-on with a hearse carrying two coffins in the back, both of a married couple that had previouslydied in a car accident.

Anthony Liccione

That we cannot rise equal to situations when we are in them — that is the tragedy of life.

Henry Miller

She wanted to touch him, to throw her arms around him — but something held her back. Maybe it was the fear that her arms would pass right through him, that she would have come all this way only to find a ghost after all.As though he’d been able to read her thoughts, he slowly angled toward her. He raised his hands and held his palms out to her. Isobel lifted her own hands to mirror his. He pressed their palms together, his fingers folding down to lace through hers. She felt a rush of warmth course through her, a relief as pure and sweet as spring rain.He was real. This was real. She had found him. She could touch him. She could feel him. Finally they were together. Finally, finally, they could forget this wasted world and go home."I knew it wasn’t true," she whispered. "I knew you wouldn’t stop believing." He drew her close.Leaning into him, she felt him press his lips to her forehead in a kiss. As he spoke, the cool metal of his lip ring grazed her skin, causing a shudder to ripple through her."You..." His voice, low and breathy, reverberated through her, down to the thin soles of her slippers. "You think you’re different," he said. She felt his hands tighten around hers, gripping hard, too hard.A streak of violet lightning split the sky, striking close behind them.The house, Isobel thought. It had been struck. She could hear it cracking apart. She looked for only a brief moment, long enough to watch it split open."But you’re not," Varen said, calling her attention back to him. Isobel winced, her own hands surrendering under the suddenly crushing pressure of his hold. A face she did not recognize stared down at her, one twisted with anger — with hate."You," he scarcely more than breathed, "are just like every. Body. Else."He moved so fast. Before she could register his words or the fact that she had once spoken them to him herself, he jerked her to one side. Isobel felt her feet part from the rocks. Weightlessness took hold of her as she swung out and over the ledge of the cliff.As he let her go.The wind whistled its high and lonely song in her ears. She fell away into the oblivion of the storm until she could no longer see the cliff — could no longer see him.Only the slip of the pink ribbon as it unraveled from her wrist, floating up and away from her and out of sight forever.

Kelly Creagh

Is there an answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people?...The response would be…to forgive the world for not being perfect, to forgive God for not making a better world, to reach out to the people around us, and to go on living despite it all…no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it has happened.

Harold S. Kushner

Every great tragedy forms a fertile soil in which a great recovery can take root and blossom...but only if you plant the seeds.

Steve Maraboli

Men walk through tragedy, quietly, calm and precise on the outside, tearing themselves to shreds inside.

Steven Herrick

As one who appreciated the tragic side of eating, it seemed to him that anything other than fruit for dessert implied a reprehensible frivolity, and cakes in particular ended up annihilating the flavour of quiet sadness that must be allowed to linger at the end of a great culinary performance.

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

The greatest tragedy that can befall a man is never to know who he really is.

James Carlos Blake

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.

Tom Perrotta

There is no man so blessed that some who stand by his deathbed won't hail the occasion with delight.

Marcus Aurelius

CHORUS:You that live in my ancestral Thebes, behold this Oedipus,- him who knew the famous riddles and was a man most masterful; not a citizen who did not look with envy on his lot- see him now and see the breakers of misfortune swallow him!Look upon that last day always. Count no mortal happy till he has passed the final limit of his life secure from pain.

Sophocles

TEIRESIAS:I tell you, king, this man, this murderer(whom you have long declared you are in search of,indicting him in threatening proclamationas murderer of Laius)- he is here.In name he is a stranger among citizensbut soon he will be shown to be a citizentrue native Theban, and he'll have no joyof the discovery: blindness for sightand beggary for riches his exchange,he shall go journeying to a foreign countrytapping his way before him with a stick.He shall be proved father and brother bothto his own children in his house; to herthat gave him birth, a son and husband both;a fellow sower in his father's bedwith that same father that he murdered.Go within, reckon that out, and if you find memistaken, say I have no skill in prophecy.

Sophocles

OEDIPUS: Upon the murderer I invoke this curse-whether he is one man and all unknown, or one of many- may he wear out his life in misery to miserable doom! If with my knowledge he lives at my hearthI pray that I myself may feel my curse. On you I lay my charge to fulfill all this for me, for the God, and for this land of ours destroyed and blighted, by the God forsaken.

Sophocles

To be the child of a conficted or reputed witch was inherently dangerous; in one pathetic case in Lorraine a young couple were both accused, and it emerged that they had decided to marry after attending an execution at the stake of their respective parents, 'so that they would have nothing to reproach one another with.

Robin Briggs

Tragedy was like that, a razor that sliced through time, severing the now from the before, incising the what-might-have-been from reality as cleanly as any surgeon's blade.

Kristin Hannah

We are rational creatures, Professor Jove explained; hope is irrational. We thus set ourselves up for one dispiriting fall after the next. Anger and depression are not diseases or dysfunctions or anomalies; they are perfectly rational responses to the myriad avoidable disappointments that begin in a thoroughly irrational hope.

Shalom Auslander

Tragedy is when someone ends up dead.Everything else is just a bump in the road.

Gabrielle Zevin

I am dwelling on things I love, even if a measure of tragedy is stitched into everything, if you follow the thread long enough

Sebastian Barry

It is at the family fireside, often under the shelter of the law itself, that the real tragedies of life are acted; in these days traitors wear gloves, scoundrels cloak themselves in public esteem, and their victims die broken-hearted, but smiling to the last. What I have just related to you is almost an every-day occurrence; and yet you profess astonishment.

Émile Gaboriau

It seemed to him that life's true tragedy was to lift up one's voice among the living and be met with indifference.

Cristina García

The blood of too many, dissolving the very stain.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Any deal that recognizes Iran "right" to enrich is a prelude to fiasco and tragedy.

Ziad K. Abdelnour

Hope? Hope is not the absence of tragedy, my friend. It is the conviction that tragedy can be endured. Hope is the spark in you that is not subdued in the face of the vast and callous indifference of the universe. Hope is that which is not shattered by hardship. Hope is the urge to fight what is wrong even when you know it will destroy you. Hope is the decision to love and need someone knowing that they will one day die. For me to promise that there are no obstacles would be the cruelest lie I could possibly tell. That lie is not hope. Hope is the will which needs no lies.

Travis Beacham

It’s just that I coulda swore you had sung me a love song back there and that you meant it but I guess sometimes people just chew with their mouth open

Buddy Wakefield

My mother used to say that sometimes if you turn a tragedy over in your hand, you can see a miracle running through it, like fool's gold in the hardest shard of rock.

Jodi Picoult

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ME AND YOUWhen I hold a rose,I see the soft, velvety petalsand smile, becausetucked betweenthose precious petalsis a special gift -the one of a fragrance,pure and sweet.When you hold a rose,you see the thornsalong the stem,and you frownbecause those thornscan bring you painand cause you to bleed.I see the gift.You see the tragedy.More and moreI fear that one of these dayssomeone will hand me a roseand all I will seeare thorns.Talk about tragedy.

Lisa Schroeder

The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex being a great example. Oedipus is drawn into tragedy not because of laziness or stupidity, but because of his courage and honesty. So an inevitable irony results....[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.

Haruki Murakami

Francis stared down at the Duchess of York's letter. He swallowed, then read aloud in a husky voice, "It was showed by John Sponer that King Richard, late mercifully reigning upon us, was through great treason piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this City." As Margaret listened, the embittered grey eyes had softened, misted with sudden tears. "My brother may lie in an untended grave," she said, "but he does not lack for an epitaph.

Sharon Kay Penman

People can act so nice, bringing you food and all, but in the end they are nothing but buzzards. Waiting to pick your bones.

Lee Smith

How could it be? For weeks he'd run himself ragged, his only goal to keep her safe until the moment when he could no longer offer her protection. Now that moment had come and gone- and so did Luce

Lauren Kate

Comedies are fit for common wits: But to present a kingly troop withal, Give me a stately-written tra

Thomas Kyd

A few weeks ago, Abdul had seen a boy’s hand cut clean off when he was putting plastic into one of the shredders. The boy’s eyes had filled with tears but he hadn’t screamed. Instead he’d stood there with his blood-spurting stump, his ability to earn a living ended, and started apologizing to the owner of the plant. “Sa’ab, I’m sorry,” he’d said to the man in white. “I won’t cause you any problems by reporting this. You will have no trouble from me.

Katherine Boo

Not having ice cream,” she proclaimed, “is the culmination of all disasters!

Brandon Sanderson

But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge.

Margaret Atwood

In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question.

Mervyn Peake

I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that's the soul seeking some relief.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The cliche that sea dry up and rocks rot away, but the heart never changes is nothing but a beautiful fantasy.

Mo Yan

Maybe it takes tragedy to create paradise.

Katie Kacvinsky

His life was a party which tragically came to an early end.

David J. Cooper

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

Her occupation was the worst that anyone could think of. No guest in the park had to think of it because, unlike the wandering dwarf women, her job had no bearing on paper.

Pam Jones

Every great tragedy forms a fertile soil in which a great recovery can take root and blossom, but only if you plant the seeds.

Steve Maraboli

A tragedy can catch us any time possible; for this very reason, we must catch the life any time possible!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Life can be at its cruelest with love and dreams. But of course they keep most of us going.

Robert Black

He's opening a door, but he already knows I won't walk through. The power of Bodee is in the way he reads me, sees through me, and then understands the truth behind the facade. He's the guy who can walk straight through the House of Mirrors on the first try. It's almost annoying. No one should ride tragedy like a pro surfer while I drown.

Courtney C. Stevens

If I could take away his pain… If there was a way to transfer it from his soul onto mine. I would take it. Without hesitation I would take it all. Maybe that’s how you know you love someone. When you actually feel each tear they cry as if they were your own. When you feel each cut, each bruise, each hit as if you’re the one suffering. I bled for him.& in turn, he bled for her.Funny, how life comes full circle

Rachel Van Dyken

Sometimes by holding onto what you love the most — you end up choking the very life from the thing you want to keep on living. It’s possible to try too hard, to love something so deeply that you lose yourself. The danger is never in loving someone — but losing your identity in the process. Because what happens when tragedy strikes? You’re left an empty shell. You’re left with nothing.

Rachel Van Dyken

But I had deliberately acquired the habit of closing my eyes even to such obvious assumptions, just as though I did not want to miss a single opportunity for tormenting myself. This is a trite device, often adopted by persons who, cut off from all other means of escape, retreat into the safe haven of regarding themselves as objects of tragedy.

Yukio Mishima

If e'er again I meet him beard to beard, he's mine or I am his.

William Shakespeare

Life is a mystical and tragic thing. It is a journey often full of fear, when it ought to be full of hope. It's fascinating to look back on your life and feel as though most of it was a precursor to the rest of it; to what was always supposed to be.

L.K. Hill

Therefore love moderately. Long love doth so. Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.

William Shakespeare

The only thing you've got in this world is what you can sell.

Arthur Miller

Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evilbut if some god shakes your houseruin arrivesruin does not leaveit comes tolling over the generationsit comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floorand all your thrashed coasts groan

Anne Carson

We can not escape tragic roads. It is like grasping at the sun & trying to catch air. We must take one step at-a-time. Keep going.

Ace Antonio Hall

She thought men were saviors......And she looked for more in them than what they were...Only to rescue herself from those she wished would rescue her...And isn't that the most tragic lie...The lie where we tell what we wished were true and believe it...?She had an artificial memory, a prosthesis to a past that never was...She was like a party that no one ever went to...Like a cure...without a disease...And isn't that the greatest fear of all...to be ready with the answersto questions that no one asks anymore?

Merrit Malloy

So our virtuesLie in the interpretation of the time:And power, unto itself most commendable,Hath not a tomb so evident as a chairTo extol what it hath done.One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail;Rights by rights falter, strengths by strengths do fail.

William Shakespeare

Every normal family is one tragedy away from complete implosion.

Katja Millay

The unavoidable has touched the life of every human being on the face of the earth. Some have rebounded, others have given up--but all of us have felt the wings of tragedy brushing against us.

Paulo Coelho

1 2 3 … 11 Next

Tragedy Quotes

Related Topics