1,113 Quotes About Tragedy

Don't you get too greedy, Death. You already have taken more than your fair share today. You can't have me yet.

It may be that The Great Gatsby is as perfect, word for word, just in terms of English; but Ulysses is deeper, richer, wider – and is comic, whereas The Great Gatsby is a tragic novel. And I think all great art is comic art.(video)

A farce or comedy is best played; a tragedy is best read at home.

Gavin had thought tragedy suited her: a young Miss Havisham, wearing the moth-eaten tatters of her frayed hopes like a ravaged bride. She had thought at first that it was the chase he craved, or the thrill of conquest, but while both of those might have been true, it was her humiliation that got him off. Physical, psychological, sexual—his favorite games were the ones he played with her head.

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.

Have you ever thought, when something dreadful happens, "a moment ago, things were not like this; let it be then, not now, anything but now?" And you try and try to remake then, but you know you can't. So you try to hold the moment quite still and not let it move on and show itself. - Nine Coaches Waiting

Why did this have to happen? So many innocent lives have already been lost and there were still so many more to go. It was difficult knowing there were still people, who were home asleep, that had no idea what terrors awaited them when they finally started their days. It was a tragedy.

..all tragedies are [unforeseeable]. That’s what makes them so hard to bear. The acceptance that life is random and often cruel. We seek to attribute blame. We cannot accept that things happen without reason. That not everything is within our control. We make ourselves small gods of our own universe without any of God’s mercy, wisdom or grace.

..all tragedies are [unforeseeable]. That’s what makes them so hard to bear. The acceptance that life is random and often cruel. We seek to attribute blame. We cannot accept that things happen without reason. That not everything is within our control. We make ourselves small gods of our own universe without any of God’s mercy, wisdom or grace.[the Rev. Jack Brooks]