Tragic Quotes - Page 34

• Razo was sorely tempted to assert that all was true and he'd lost his horns and tail in a tragic childhood accident

  Shannon Hale

  Childhood, Tails, Lost

  Shannon Hale (2010). “River Secrets”, p.28, A&C Black

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• You go to someone and you think, 'I'll tell him this.' But why? The impulse is that the telling is going to relieve you. And that's why you feel awful later--you've relieved yourself, and if it truly is tragic and awful, it's not better, it's worse---the exhibitionism inherent to a confession has only made the misery worse.

  Philip Roth

  Thinking, Exhibitionism, Awful

  Philip Roth (1997). “American Pastoral”, p.90, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• We even talked like Hemingway characters, though in travesty, as if to deny our discipleship: That is your bed, and it is a good bed, and you must make it and you must make it well. Or: Today is the day of the meatloaf. The meatloaf is swell. It is swell but when it is gone the not-having meatloaf will be tragic and the meatloaf man will not come anymore.

  Tobias Wolff

  Character, Men, Today Is The Day

  Tobias Wolff (2004). “Old School”, p.14, Vintage

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• A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.

  Alain de Botton

  Art, Majority, Would Be

  Alain De Botton (2008). “Status Anxiety”, p.156, Vintage

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• But mostly, I remembered what I’ve always believed. What my mom taught me. That while some things are just plain awful, most things in life can be seen either tragic or comic. And it’s your choice. Is life a big, long, tiresome slog from sadness to regret to guilt to resentment to self-pity? Or is life weird, outrageous, bizarre, ironic, and just stupid? Gotta go with stupid. It’s not the easy way out. Self pity is the easiest thing in the world. Finding the humor, the irony, the slight justification for a skewed, skeptical optimism. That’s tough. - Marco, Animorphs #35: The Proposal

  Katherine Applegate

  Mom, Regret, Stupid

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• Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.

  Henry James, Sr.

  Spiritual, Flower, Night

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• The anger that Uncle Junior has comes from my background. My father was the son of an Italian immigrant, and I've seen the fire of the Italian temperament. It can be explosive sometimes in ways that are both funny and tragic.

  Dominic Chianese

  Uncles, Father, Anger

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• The world censures those who take up arms to defend their causes and calls on them to use nonviolent means in voicing their grievances. But when a people chooses the nonviolent path, it is all too often the case that hardly anyone pays attention. It is tragic that people have to suffer and die and the television cameras have to deliver the pictures to people's homes every day before the world at large admits there is a problem.

  Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo

  Home, Mean, People

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• It is tragic that many in America think of us - Christians - as being people who hate others.

  Anne Rice

  Christian, Hate, Thinking

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• You can't be funny unless you're tragic, and you can't be tragic unless you're funny.

  Elaine Stritch

  Theatre

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• I have learned that human existence is essentially tragic. It is only the love of God, disclosed and enacted in Christ, that redeems the human tragedy and makes it tolerable. No, more than tolerable. Wonderful.

  Mark Twain

  Humanity, Tragedy, Wonderful

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• Take death for example. A great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it, and often consider its intrusion a tragic event. Yet we'd find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.

  Ray Kurzweil

  Giving, Effort, Events

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• That's just tragic, that you can spend four years of your life studying the design of three dimensional objects and not make one.

  Jonathan Ive

  Years, Design, Three

  "Design education is "tragic" says Jonathan Ive" by Anna Winston, www.dezeen.com. November 13, 2014.

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• Time passes swiftly, but is it not joyous to see how great and growing is the treasure we have gathered together, amid the storms and stresses of so many eventful and to millions tragic and terrible years?

  Winston Churchill

  Stress, Years, Storm

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• With the departure of Congressman Neil Abercrombie (D), who is running for the governorship of Hawaii, and with the tragic and very sad passing of my personal friend Jack Murtha (D-Pa.), mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill and this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they’ve gotten rid of me and it will pass. You connect the dots.

  Eric Massa

  Running, House, Hawaii

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• Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.

  Salman Rushdie

  Religious, Real, Heart

  "Salman Rushdie condemns attack on Charlie Hebdo". www.englishpen.org. January 7, 2015.

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• By the respectable terms of the modern literary profession, novelists do not preach. And, in fact, there has probably not been a less respectable novelist among the irrefutably enduring writers of our time than Ayn Rand: philosopher queen of the best-seller lists in the forties and fifties, cult phenomenon and nationally declared threat to public morality in the sixties, guru to the Libertarians and to White House economic policy in the seventies, and a continuing exemplar or Wilde's tragic observation that more than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

  Claudia Roth

  Queens, White, House

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• I do feel ashamed of having participated to the slightest even as a tool in those dark days. But I was obliged to serve the state to which I had taken an oath. It was a tragic fate.

  Walther Funk

  Taken, Fate, Dark

  "The Nuremberg Interviews: Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses". Book by Leon Goldensohn, Random House, p. 85 (To Leon Goldensohn, April 14, 1946), 2010.

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• To us Germans everything is religion. What we do we do not merely with our hands and brains, but with our hearts and souls. This has often become a tragic fate for us.

  Baldur von Schirach

  Heart, Fate, Hands

  "The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership". Book by Joachim C. Fest, p. 220, 1999.

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• If you have ever been in a real tragic or sad situation, the words that come out are hopelessly inadequate and kind of cliched.

  Erika Slezak

  Real, Hopeless, Kind

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• Human nature has its fatal weaknesses, but 'love' means embracing the whole of human nature, the bad within the good, the benign within the malicious, the beautiful within the tragic. 'Love' is the experience of this whole, its unfinished parts, including those of one's own in relation to those of the other.

  Qiu Miaojin

  Beautiful, Mean, Love Is

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• It makes it difficult to decide which to go see, since no film about say, some tragic genocide in Africa is going to get a bad review even if it's poorly made.

  Terry Zwigoff

  Film, Genocide, Made

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• This tragic brow, these closed eyes, eyebrows raised and knotted.

  Frederick Leboyer

  Eye, Brows, Raised

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• If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.

  Arthur Koestler

  Israel, Way, Power Corrupts

  Arthur Koestler, Harold Harris (1975). “Astride the two cultures: Arthur Koestler at 70”, Not Avail

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• There were some tragic cases of women whose love was abused, who for a certain time procured important documents or information, not knowing who for, what service they worked for, and for a variety reasons got jailed, were tried and sentenced.

  Markus Wolf

  Love, Knowing, Important

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