Tragic Quotes - Page 2

• I'm for the individual as opposed to the corporation. The way it is the individual is the underdog, and with all the things a corporation has going for them the individual comes out banged on her head. The artist is nothing. It's really tragic.

  Marilyn Monroe

  Artist, Underdog, Corporations

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works.

  Willa Cather

  Children, Husband, Grandmother

  Willa Cather (1988). “Not Under Forty”, p.136, U of Nebraska Press

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• Life, a beauty chased by tragic laughter.

  John Masefield

  Laughter, Laughing

  John Masefield (1923). “The Collected Poems”

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• Can an ass be tragic?--To perish under a burden that one can neither bear nor cast off? The case of the philosopher.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Philosophical, Bears, Philosopher

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• What is tragic today is that there is a number of Muslims who think that all the solutions are to be found simply by external actions. They don't have to do anything within themselves. This is a deeply Western idea - modern, Western idea, where you try to improve the world without improving yourself. And this is what the Muslims who talk about others putting their heads in the sand and that "We are doing jihad and we are political" and so forth, they are emulating a very important mistake of modernism.

  Seyyed Hossein Nasr

  Mistake, Thinking, Ideas

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• Sometimes you feel a need to express yourself, and there is no better way than to go to places where people need everything. It's dramatic, it's tragic. You just can't understand why, in the world of today, there are still things like that. The images you see on TV kill you. Of course when you are there (at these trouble spots) you can't turn off the TV. You are face-to-face with reality.

  Sophia Loren

  Reality, People, World

  Source: www.sfgate.com

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• Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Fashion, Two, Mind

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• I think what history will show is that one of the most tragic results of the war in Iraq will be that although Sharon, the Likudites, the Neoconservatives in our country, President Bush and the Democratic party thought the war in Iraq and destroying Saddam would benefit Israeli security, we're seeing absolutely that the war in Iraq has probably put Israeli security in a more tenuous condition than it's been in since the founding of the Israeli state.

  Michael Scheuer

  Country, War, Party

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• One of the most tragic things about slavery was the mental enslavement, the way they made us believe that we were worth nothing; and that's what she's fighting against.

  Jurnee Smollett

  Believe, Fighting, Slavery

  "Jurnee Smollett-Bell Gets Deep About Underground, a Slave Narrative That Will Make You Proud to Be Black". Interview with Ronda Racha Penrice, www.theroot.com. March 9, 2016.

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• It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.

  Doris Lessing

  Emotional, Dancing, Unhappy

  Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• I think that it's so powerful for me to go see someone like Bridget Everett at Joe's Pub and watch her weave her songs in and out of these funny, tragic stories - you can talk and sing and it's not this horrible offense, you're going to get thrown in artistic jail.

  Kathleen Hanna

  Song, Powerful, Thinking

  "The Riot Act". Interview with Emma Brown, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 4, 2013.

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• A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes, it was an interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

  Oscar Wilde

  Beautiful, Mother, Pain

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.36, GENERAL PRESS

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• Can you imagine anything more tragic?' Rose asked. 'To be born a princess --native and to the manor born-- and then to forget who you are and settle for being something horrible like an--an accountant!

  Regina Doman

  Princess, Rose, Forget

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• There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detached.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Mind, Gone, Awful

  Hunter S. Thompson (2011). “The Rum Diary: Film Tie-in Edition”, p.126, A&C Black

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• There are people with physical disabilities that prevent them from having any hope - in some cases any actual hope and in other cases any practical hope - of marriage. The circumstance of being currently unable to marry, while tragic, is not unique.

  Dallin H. Oaks

  Unique, People, Disability

  Source: www.mormonnewsroom.org

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• Every year I used to write a musical inspired by John Waters, and I would get all my friends together and put on this perverse, emotional, tragic musical.

  Antony Hegarty

  Writing, Emotional, Years

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• It's a tragic fact to die in an accident

  Gabrielle Zevin

  Facts, Accidents, Dies

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• For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time. That is not such a tragic thing as possibly it sounds to you. To those who are in prison tears are a part of every day's experience. A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not a day on which one's heart is happy.

  Oscar Wilde

  Heart, Years, Space

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: De profundis, "Epistola : in carcere et vinculis"”, p.128, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• I am fundamentally happy. Everyone has experiences that makes them cynical, jaded or unhappy - you just have to fight those things off. I have totally emotional days when I cry and get insecure. PMS weirded out, doomed and tragic. I mean, I'm definitely not just a lollipop, happy in the wind girl. I'm human just like everyone else, but I think that it would be tragic to be on your deathbed and think, 'I could've I should've.' That gets me out of bed everyday. I can't even last like an hour in bed in the morning. I have to get out there and live.

  Drew Barrymore

  Girl, Morning, Mean

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• I don't want to die before my parents die, especially my mother. Because I think that's tragic. Because I don't want her to get the chance to pick out what I'm going to wear for eternity.

  Jon Stewart

  Mother, Thinking, Parent

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• Wine talks; ask anyone. The oracle at the street corner; the uninvited guest at the wedding feast; the holy fool. It ventriloquizes. It has a million voices. It unleashes the tongue, teasing out secrets you never meant to tell, secrets you never even knew. It shouts, rants, whispers. It speaks of great plans, tragic loves, and terrible betrayals. It screams with laughter. It chuckles softly to itself. It weeps in front of its own reflection. It revives summers long past and memories best forgotten. Every bottle a whiff of other times, other places, everyone...a humble miracle

  Joanne Harris

  Summer, Laughter, Memories

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• Man... is an inextricable tangle of culture and biology. And not being simple, he is not simply good; he has... a kind of hell within him from which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilization. He has the faculty of imagining for himself more in the way of pleasure and satisfaction than he can possibly achieve. Everything that he gains he pays for in more than equal coin; compromise and the compounding with defeat constitute his best way of getting through the world. His best qualities are the result of a struggle whose outcome is tragic. Yet he is a creature of love.

  Lionel

  Struggle, Simple, Men

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• The tragic hero prefers death to prudence. The comedian prefers playing tricks to winning. Only the villain really plays to win.

  Mason Cooley

  Hero, Winning, Play

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• How cold the vacancy
  When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
  First sees reality. The mortal no
  Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.

  Wallace Stevens

  Reality, Vacancy, Gone

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.331, Vintage

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• Ethan and I are done," I said finally. "I'm sorry." "He was my first boyfriend." "I know." "The only real boyfriend I've had. I'm a senior in high school and he was my only real boyfriend." "I know." "And I won't find another one at Jones Hall. That is guaranteed." "Okay." "This is all very sad and tragic," I said. Alan unwrapped a sleeve of Smarties. "Yet, oddly, you don't seem that upset." "I know.

  Sara Zarr

  Senior, Sorry, Real

  Sara Zarr (2008). “Sweethearts”, p.148, Hachette UK

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