Quotes About Greek Tragedy

#1. Greek tragedy operates through the ear. It is through the ear primarily that it enters the eyes, the senses, the mind, the heart. It must be spoken aloud. It is designed for that. And until that is done these plays have not been read, have not been used, have not been born.

Paul Roche

#2. In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.

Dennis Lehane

#3. Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock-exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared.

Jean Baudrillard

#4. In some ways grief anonymizes as powerfully as a Greek tragedy mask.

Tana French

#5. Frequently my life has been likened to a Greek tragedy, and the actress in me cannot deny that comparison.

Patricia Neal

#6. I'm drawn to a lot of tragedies, and I love a Greek tragedy.But I would think - I start thinking realistically about it, and performing eight days a week, that would take a toll. I take things to heart. I don't know if I could survive, like, "Medea."

Eva Mendes

#7. It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

Henry A. Kissinger

#8. Greek tragedy was pre-Freudian, so every emotion has to be so raw; there are no psychological undertones.

Lydia Leonard

#9. People try to make a Greek tragedy of my life, and they can't do it. I'm too happy.

Curt Flood

#10. My first job was a Greek tragedy, and ever since, one job just seemed to roll onto the next. I've been terribly lucky.

Hayley Atwell

#11. It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded.

Oscar Wilde

#12. I think American drama is at its best when it takes the domestic and makes it epic, like a Greek tragedy in the front room.

Anne-Marie Duff

#13. Under (Lyndon) Johnson, the Senate functions like a Greek tragedy. All the action takes place offstage, before the play begins. Nothing is left for the participants but the enactment of their prescribed roles.

Bobby Baker

#14. ...I like to see things through the lens of Greek tragedy, which teaches us, among other things, that real tragedy is never a straightforward confrontation between Good and Evil, but is rather much more exquisitely and much more agonizingly, a conflict between two irreconcilable views of the world.

Daniel Mendelsohn

#15. My sister's looking off to the side so half her face is in shadow and her smile is neatly cut in half. It's like one of those Greek tragedy masks in a textbook that's half one idea and half the opposite. Light and dark. Hope and despair. Laughter and sadness. Trust and loneliness.

Haruki Murakami

#16. I often teach a graduate theater seminar on Greek tragedy in performance. I usually begin by saying that no matter what technological advances occur, the wisdom of these plays will never be obsolete.

Neil Patrick Harris

#17. Sometimes bad luck hits you like in an ancient Greek tragedy, and it's not your own making. When you have a plane crash, it's not your fault.

Werner Herzog

#18. 'Greek Street' is a very strange beast. I think of it as 'The Long Good Friday' meets 'Agamemnon.' A way of using those fantastically rich stories from Greek tragedy to take a look at our world and to explore some of the things I think about this world.

Peter Milligan

#19. I've come to realize that life is not a musical comedy, it's a Greek tragedy.

Billy Joel

#20. I told myself that historically when people do too well too quickly, they are a Greek tragedy waiting to happen.

Anne Lamott

#21. I always think a good sports movie is emblematic in the same way that a great Greek tragedy really has a certain kind of structure, or a Shakespearean play if you're looking at a comedy or a tragedy, is that these are the heights and depths of human emotion.

Carla Gugino

#22. The theater of man is not always 'amusing', but it is always theater, and theater can be marveled at even when its content is somber and harsh. You're acquainted with Greek tragedy?

Tom Robbins

#23. The tragedy of Eliot Spitzer is almost Greek: Ascendant son of wealth and privilege dedicates his life to social justice, warns of the corruption lurking among us, and falls victim to his inner demons at the very moment of vindication.

Wil S. Hylton

#24. In childbirth grief begins.

Euripides

#25. To be kept waiting is unfortunate, but to be kept waiting with nothing interesting to read is a tragedy of Greek proportions" -Agatha Swanburne

Maryrose Wood

#26. Receive the god into your kingdom
pour libations, cover your head with ivy, join the dance!

Euripides

#27. I have a pullout couch, and I could sleep in the living room. You can have the bedroom."
"I'm sorry. No." Mel put her hand on his chest, her eyes sparkling. "I have to draw the line there. I should at least get sex out of this deal or this really would be a tragedy.

Lisa Kessler

#28. No one will ever make necessity not happen.

Anne Carson

#29. I gave them hope, and so turned away their eyes from death

Aeschylus

#30. You are young and young your rule and you think that the tower in which you live is free from sorrow: from it have I not seen two tyrants thrown? The third, who now is king, I shall yet live to see him fall, of all three most suddenly, most dishonored.

Aeschylus

#31. I'm intrigued by the classic Greek tragedies, as well as by the idea of the Greek chorus.

Joseph Boyden

#32. Argos the greatest tragedy in Greek legend was

Will Durant

#33. What cannot be borne in reality, becomes a source of pleasure when it is transposed into the visual and somatic fiction of the dramatic spectacle.

Claude Calame

#34. It's human; we all put self interest first.

Euripides

#35. [A]s Agatha Swanburne once said, 'To be kept waiting is unfortunate, but to be kept waiting with nothing interesting to read is a tragedy of Greek proportions.

Maryrose Wood

#36. I don't write fantasy, I write reality. Also, my novels have roots to Greek tragedies and as such, there has to be tragedy.

Nicholas Sparks

#37. Not too little, not too much: there safety lies.

Euripides

#38. Old loves are dropped when new ones come

Euripides

#39. I'd three times sooner go to war than suffer childbirth once.

Euripides

#40. Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.

Karl Marx

#41. Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.

Euripides

#42. Of all creatures that can feel and think,
we women are the worst treated things alive

Euripides

#43. Mortal fate is hard. You'd best get used to it.

Euripides

#44. Ten thousand men possess ten thousand hopes. A few bear fruit in happiness; the others go awry. But he who garners day by day the good life, he is happiest.

Gilbert Murray

#45. We all know what tragedy is. "Yes, I'd rather not have any more tragedy, please. I'll have comedy, please." Comedy, in the Greek sense, only means that it has a happy ending.

Eric Drooker

#46. Who can stop grief's avalanche once it starts to roll.

Euripides

#47. Laughter and weeping, the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy, mark the extremes of a continuous spectrum; both provide channels for the overflow of emotion; both are

Arthur Koestler

#48. Our word Tragedy comes from the greek, tragos-ode: "The song of the goat." Anybody who has ever heard a goat attempt to sing will know why.

Neil Gaiman

#49. PROMETHEUS: 'Oh, it is easy for the one who stands outside the prison-wall of pain to exhort and teach the one who suffers

Aeschylus