Tragic Quotes - Page 9

• The poor prey on one another because their lives offer no hope and communicate the tragic message to these human beings that they have no possibility to attain a decent standard of living.

  Thabo Mbeki

  Messages, Poor, Possibility

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• I have been used for a purpose, and there will be a certain tragic occurrence happening if you don't take my testimony and somehow vindicate me so my people don't suffer because of what I have done.

  Jack Ruby

  People, Suffering, Purpose

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

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• In comedy, reconcilement with life comes at the point when to the tragic sense only an inalienable difference or dissension with life appears.

  Constance Rourke

  Differences, Comedy, Dissension

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• Many claim I am a photographer of tragedy. In the greater sense I am not, for though I often photograph where the tragic emotion is present, the result is almost invariably affirmative.

  W. Eugene Smith

  Tragedy, Emotion, Photographer

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• He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo. Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic. Nothing is more sublime.

  Victor Hugo

  Paris, Sublime, Depth

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• As many know, and especially those who may have young sons or daughters at colleges or universities, the last thing you want to hear is a call that perhaps one of your children was injured or, even worse, lost their life in a tragic fire at a dorm or campus housing.

  Vito Fossella

  Daughter, Mother, Children

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• Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.

  George Eliot

  Heart, Sadness, Ties

  George Eliot (1859). “Adam Bede”, p.34, London

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• Congratulations," he said, his voice dry. "You finally managed to find a woman as tragically noble as yourself. I didn't think one existed." "I'm not tragic." Kaldar held up his hand. "Spare me. Some children are born wearing a silk shirt; you were born wrapped in melancholy. When they slapped you to make you cry, you just sighed heavily and a single tear rolled from your eye." He dragged his finger from the corner of his left eye to his cheek. " Your first words were probably 'woe is me.'" "My first words were 'Kaldar, shut up!' because you talked too much. Still do.

  Ilona Andrews

  Children, Congratulations, Eye

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• He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

  Edith Wharton

  Loneliness, Winter, Profound

  Ethan Frome preface (1911)

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• A lot of people get the wrong impression, think there's something romantic or tragic about hitting bottom.

  Donald Ray Pollock

  Thinking, People, Hitting Bottom

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• You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.

  Lawrence Durrell

  Opposites, Matter, Pleasure

  Lawrence Durrell (2012). “The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea”, p.222, Faber & Faber

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• One of the pitfalls about writing about illness is that it is very easy to imagine people with cancer as either these wise-beyond-their-years creatures or these sad-eyed tragic people. And the truth is, people living with cancer are very much like people who are not living with cancer. They're every bit as funny and complex and diverse as anyone else.

  John Green

  Wise, Cancer, Writing

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• When we talk about our lives, long or short, brief and tragic or enduring beyond comprehension, we impose a continuity on them, and that continuity is a lie.

  Anne Rice

  Lying, Long, Endure

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• George turned to her. His blue eyes widened. His lovely face took on a forlorn, deeply troubled expression. He leaned forwar, and, in a theatrical whisper, said, 'My past is tragic. I wouldn't want to burden you with it. It's a pain I must suffer alone. In the rain. In silence.

  Ilona Andrews

  Pain, Rain, Eye

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• I photographed the entire thing in color because to photograph it in black and white would be to keep it as a tragedy. Because there is a tragic element to photographing, in this case not war, but the collapse. It was just destruction.

  Joel Meyerowitz

  Photography, War, Black And White

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• The causes of illusions are not pretty to discover. They're either vicious or tragic.

  Ayn Rand

  Causes, Illusion, Vicious

  Ayn Rand (2005). “The Fountainhead”, p.297, Penguin

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• Down through the years my face has been called a sour puss, a dead pan, a frozen face, The Great Stone Face, and, believe it or not, "a tragic mask." On the other hand that kindly critic, the late James Agee, described my face as ranking "almost with Lincoln's as an early American archetype, it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful." I can't imagine what the great rail splitter's reaction would have been to this, though I sure was pleased.

  Buster Keaton

  Beautiful, Believe, Hands

  "My Wonderful World Of Slapstick".

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• Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Pain, Expression, Sorrow

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2006). “A Defence of Poetry: an Essay: Easyread Large Edition”, p.57, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the damned,' whereas Dr P. was not fighting, did not know what was lost. But who was more tragic, or who was more damned -- the man who knew it, or the man who did not?

  Oliver Sacks

  Fighting, Men, Differences

  Oliver Sacks (2014). “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: Picador Classic”, p.28, Pan Macmillan

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• Tiffany knew what the problem was immediately. She'd seen it before, at birthday parties. Her brother was suffering from tragic sweet deprivation. Yes, he was surrounded by sweets. But the moment he took any sweet at all, said his sugar-addled brain, that meant he was not taking all the rest. And there were so many sweets he'd never be able to eat them all. It was too much to cope with. The only solution was to burst into tears.

  Terry Pratchett

  Sweet, Brother, Party

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• All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy. When it was over, the host of the planetary systems still lived on, with here and there a casualty, and here and there among the stars a new planetary birth, and here and there a fresh disaster.

  Olaf Stapledon

  Stars, Long, Effort

  Olaf Stapledon (1931). “Last and First Men, & Star Maker: Two Science-fiction Novels”, p.379, Courier Corporation

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• A car's not the right place for showing off to a girl—the bed's the place for that. The consequences of a mistake there are more upsetting, but less tragic.

  Sergei Lukyanenko

  Girl, Mistake, Car

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• There are stories that are true, in which each individual's tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it to deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others' pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.

  Neil Gaiman

  Pain, Loss, Unique

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• Fire supposed he needed to be there in order to give rousing speeches and lead the charge into the fray, or whatever is was commanders did in wartime. She resented his competence at something so tragic and senseless. She wished he, or somebody, would throw down his sword and say, 'Enough! This is a silly way to decide who's in charge!' And it seemed to her, as the beds in the healing room filled and emptied and filled, that these battles didn't leave much to be in charge of. The kingdom was already broken, and this war was tearing the broken pieces smaller.

  Kristin Cashore

  War, Silly, Healing

  Kristin Cashore (2009). “Fire”, p.250, Penguin

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• What a tragic realm this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don't know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not understand what it means.

  Philip K. Dick

  Mean, Thinking, Tragedy

  Philip K. Dick (2011). “The Divine Invasion”, p.128, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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