Quotes About Tragedy And Death

#1. Tragedy and death would follow a person whereever he went in life. There was no such thing as escape, except maybe the kind that Mr. Kirby had accomplished ...

Joyce Maynard

#2. Psychologists have found that people who watch less TV are actually more accurate judges of life's risks and rewards than those who subject themselves to the tales of crime, tragedy, and death that appear night after night on the ten o'clock news.32

Shawn Achor

#3. I'll never forget Hurricane Katrina - the mix of a natural and a man-made catastrophe that resulted in the death of over 1,500 of our neighbors. Millions of folks were marked by the tragedy.

Cedric Richmond

#4. Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

Barnett Newman

#5. Kids do have to learn that life is a humiliating charade of endless disappointment and tragedy ultimately culminating in pain, decay, and death. My parents used to sing me to sleep with that one.

Samantha Bee

#6. How can we help students to understand that the tragedy of life is not death; the tragedy is to die with commitments undefined and convictions undeclared and service unfulfilled?

Vachel Lindsay

#7. It's odd, isn't it? People die every day and the world goes on like nothing happened. But when it's a person you love, you think everyone should stop and take notice. That they ought to cry and light candles and tell you that you're not alone.

Kristina McMorris

#8. Weeping is not the same thing as crying. It takes your whole body to weep, and when it's over, you feel like you don't have any bones left to hold you up.

Sarah Ockler

#9. Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.

Tom Perrotta

#10. Some people simply bury their heads in the sand and refuse to think about the sorrow of the world, but this is an unwise course, because, if we are entirely unprepared, the tragedy of life can be devastating.

Karen Armstrong

#11. A comedy ends with a wedding, and a tragedy ends with a funeral: you always have to juxtapose sex and death.

Chuck Palahniuk

#12. Time for me is now double-edged: every day brings me further from the low of my last relapse but closer to the next recurrence - and, eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire.

Paul Kalanithi

#13. Time, the thing we can't beat back ... Yet, time is also what it takes to heal, what it takes for certain memory cells to die.
Maybe time doesn't heal. Maybe it doesn't even pass. We pass through time, and come out stunned, so rage, and memory, are blurred.

Kiana Davenport

#14. Good had defeated evil, people proclaimed, a justification for atrocities best left forgotten. They would cling to this oversimplified truth while trading pats on the back and placing flowers on graves.

Kristina McMorris

#15. I was thinking about all these things and more, but I wasn't really thinking about them at all. They were just there, floating around in the back of my mind, thinking about themselves. What I was really thinking about, of course, was Lucas.

Kevin Brooks

#16. The abrupt and sudden death of my wife has taken a severe emotional and psychic toll on me. On top of that, some people have stooped so low that they have tried to use my personal tragedy for their personal benefit.

Shashi Tharoor

#17. Like the roller coaster of life ... novels aren't fun without ups and downs and even an occasional loop.

Carmen DeSousa

#18. We simply prefer to deny death or tragedy at all costs and, with it, a fundamental aspect of life. We do this instead of acknowledging that suffering represents one of the strongest incentives of life, which is the base of human solidarity and what brings intensity to happiness.

Claudia Llosa

#19. I want to fix an image of him in my head, but all I can see when I close my eyes is his body, still and lifeless in my arms. I let him go, and I will never forgive myself for that.

Clare Mackintosh

#20. There can be no darker or more devastating tragedy than the death of man's faith in himself and in his power to direct his future.

Saul Alinsky

#21. No popularity exists when tragedy strikes. All that's left are human hearts and love and ache. We all love each other, deep down, and when we see another soul in pain we can't help but hurt too.

Maya Van Wagenen

#22. Death isn't a tragedy to God, only to those left behind.

Patricia Briggs

#23. He wishes he could remember everything. Anything. He doesn't sense a bone in his body that can feel compassion or worthiness. Self-pity hides away as well, the lowest form of emotion not even capable of resting in his wrecked mind.

Christy A. Campbell

#24. The tragedy of life is not death, but fearing to live, allowing parts of us to wilt and die instead of flower and rejoice.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#25. Only the debris of wreckage, and not much of that, was left behind by the sharks who fed on tragedy: the fishermen, too, mourned the death of a living child.

William Trevor

#26. A Tornado knocks a house down, killing the owner, and it's a tragedy. Then you learn a serial killer lived there and the same act becomes a miracle. The truth about what happens to us in this world keeps changing. Always. It never stops. Sometimes not even after death.

Marisha Pessl

#27. Life is the tragedy,' she said bitterly. 'You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. So we're all living tragedies, because we all end the same way, and it isn't with a goddamn wedding.

Robyn Schneider

#28. I could croak with no warning, and the only tragedy anyone would experience would be showing up on the last day of my estate sale simply to discover that all remaining items had copious amounts of dog hair on them.

Laurie Notaro

#29. Then haste we down to meet thy friends and foes;
To place thy friends in ease, the rest in woes.
For here though death doth end their misery,
I'll there begin their endless tragedy.

Thomas Kyd

#30. I didn't realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another - bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.

Karen Russell

#31. That is the tragedy of losing an older brother. He stays still. You keep on and one day become the older one. It's unnatural, that reversal. It's the thing that keeps the family from ever being whole again.

Tiffany McDaniel

#32. To lose the only creature in all his world who ever had manifested love and affection for him was the greatest tragedy he had ever known.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

#33. A bead of cold sweat dangled on my fingertip before dripping onto the doorbell. What if I got electrocuted from my wet fingers? I would die literally inches from my first high school party. And everyone would be like, oh, poor thing was so nervous, what a tragedy. Death by sweat.

Lindsey Leavitt

#34. Every tragedy is unique, just as every human is unique. When a person loses someone dear to her, who am I to say that my tragedy was greater? I have no right. For that person, her tragedy is the greatest in the world - and she is right in thinking so.

Elie Wiesel

#35. The tragedy of her death was not that it made one, now and then and very intensely, unhappy. It was that it made her unreal; and us solemn, and self-conscious. We were made to act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know. It obscured, it dulled.

Virginia Woolf

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

Aeschylus

#37. I see death and tragedy all the time and nothing makes it worse than when it's totally senseless. All she needed was some niceness, some basic human kindness, and she wouldn't be on her way to the morgue and her parents wouldn't be devastated. It's heartbreaking and so senseless.

Jay Crownover

#38. Tragedy has the great moral defect of giving too much importance to life and death.

Nicolas Chamfort

#39. Sorry. Don't need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.

Cormac McCarthy

#40. The wise man looks at death with honesty, dignity and calm, recognizing that the tragedy it brings is inherent in the great gift of life.

Corliss Lamont

#41. Happy Endings are an illusion. Real life is filled with brief moments of fleeting happiness, but ultimately every life is a tragedy that ends in death and grief.

Oliver Gaspirtz

#42. The candle glimmers but an hour. The night
Looms in its ancient hunger. Would you know
The tragedy of human love and need?
Gaze on the stars, then on a brother's face!

George Sterling

#43. The locus of the modern struggle with its enemy of death is clearly the body (not mind, society, or the afterworld). The body is the site of tragedy, the ultimate unresolvable paradox, for it is at once the source of life and of death.

Margaret M. Lock

#44. I have accumulated a wealth of knowledge in innumerable spheres and enjoyed it as an always ready instrument for exercising the mind and penetrating further and further. Best of all, mine has been a life of loving and being loved. What a tragedy that all this will disappear with the used-up body!

Richard Goldschmidt

#45. MY LIFE IS a beautiful tragedy. A sad love story on an endless loop. The players may evolve and the setting may change, but it's always the same. Love. Pain. Death. Repeat.

S.L. Jennings

#46. I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.

Edgar Allan Poe

#47. When death comes too near, comedy and tragedy fall silent.

Mason Cooley

#48. I'd accepted my judgment without question. Agreed to live a mortal life. I didn't know my memories would come with me; didn't know I'd relive them every day.
Death would have been more merciful.

Christine Fonseca

#49. A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from another side.

Andrew Coyle Bradley

#50. We who have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable to people living in the aftermath of the death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest love on the implacable altars of their pride.

Salman Rushdie

#51. How tragic lives there are in this world! But there is a greater tragedy: People who have very hard lives often believe that they will have a better life after death! Losing hope in life and running after an absolute illusion is even a bigger tragedy!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#52. She was pretty and smart, which makes her death a tragedy. She was poor and black, which means people say they saw it coming.

Gabrielle Zevin

#53. Human comedy is more profound than tragedy. In tragedy we die and it is very sad. In comedy we avoid death, and it is even sadder.

Jennifer Stone

#54. Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.

Orson Scott Card

#55. Dark circles under my eyes sink deeper and deeper into my skull, in contrast to my pale skin there is an undeniable resemblance to a fresh corpse.

Dee Remy

#56. Maybe that was why the French called orgasms "las petites morts": because the things that bring us passion tend to slip past our defenses, to creep insidiously into every facet of our consciousnesses and kill us as ruthlessly, and efficiently, as any drug.

Nenia Campbell

#57. A gripper of a read ... Silence revives the cliff's-edge drama of those Jazz age climbs and drives home the tragedy of Mallory's death.

Bruce Barcott

#58. Her death leaves me both depleted and emboldened. That's what tragedy does to you, I am learning. The sadness and wild freedom of it all impart a strange durability. I feel weathered and detached, tucking my head against the winds and trudging forward into life.

Claire Bidwell Smith

#59. She knew for a fact that she wasn't going to sit around and wait for some miracle to happen. She wasn't going to watch the storm in front of her and pretend like nothing had happened. Yes, Allah is expecting her to be patient and keep on marching forward

Diyar Harraz

#60. I've thought from the start that a parallel federal investigation into the death of Michael Brown is important. I also believe that our state and local elected officials have been given a responsibility by the people who they work for to get to the bottom of this tragedy.

Roy Blunt

#61. Tragic deaths aren't avoidable. That's what Ezra said outside Sam's wake, and even though--to use Foster's phrasing--I didn't know anything about anything, I felt in this moment that Ezra was wrong. What often makes something tragic is that it can be avoided.

Emma Mills

#62. In Shakespearean tragedy the main source of the convulsion which produces suffering and death is never good: good contributes to this convulsion only from its tragic implication with its opposite in one and the same character.

Andrew Coyle Bradley

#63. Easter is not limited to the passion and death of Christ; it also includes the dismal tragedy of life unlived by the many, and all the loss of passion and truth that goes with it.

Michael Leunig

#64. Behold those times re-created by
the brutal power of sunlit images,
the light of life's tragedy.
The walls of the trial, the field
of the firing squad; and the distant
ghost of Rome's suburbs in a ring,
gleaming white in naked light.
Gunshots: our death, our survival.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

#65. One death is a tragedy, and a million deaths are a statistic.

Nicholas Kristof

#66. People can act so nice, bringing you food and all, but in the end they are nothing but buzzards. Waiting to pick your bones.

Lee Smith

#67. Mankind is immortal
in the comic perspective not by virtue of man's subjugation of nature
but by virtue of man's subjection to it. The "fall" in tragedy ends in
death; the fall in comedy ends in bed, where, by natures's arithmetic,
one and one make a brand new one.

Rose A. Zimbardo

#68. This familiarity with a respected physician and my appreciation of his work, or the tragedy I experienced with the long, tormented agony and death of my mother might have influenced me in wanting to study medicine. It was not the case.

Albert Claude

#69. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death.

Whittaker Chambers

#70. Life is not profound without its own tragedy. It humbles us. Sets the bar for our introspection. Keeps us from believing we are gods. Puts our egos in check.

Crystal Evans

#71. When everything looks the same on the outside, yet everything has changed on the inside, we break. We break in half.
This is the duality of loss.

Christina Rasmussen

#72. No matter how devastating our struggles, disappointments, and troubles are, they are only temporary. No matter what happens to you, no matter the depth of tragedy or pain you face, no matter how death stalks you and your loved ones, the Resurrection promises you a future of immeasurable good.

Josh McDowell

#73. And then I did what I had never done in his presence, much less in his arms. I cried.

Erich Segal

#74. In tragedy and despair, when an endless night seems to have fallen, hope can be found in the realization taht the companion of night is not another night, that the companion of night is day, that darkness always gives way to light, and that death rules only half of creation, life the other half.

Dean Koontz

#75. IF YOU REALLY let life take you, if you release control and stop clinging to sameness, you can't imagine the places you'll end up. But most people don't do that. Most people get this death grip on what they know, and the only thing that loosens their grasp is some kind of tragedy.

Lisa Unger

#76. The ferocity of Santiago Nasar's fate, which had collected twenty years of happiness from him not only with his death but also with the dismemberment of his body and its dispersion and extermination.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#77. Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.

Raymond Chandler

#78. That is the inescapable math of tragedy and the multiplication of grief. Too many good people die a little when they lose someone they love. One death begets two or twenty or one hundred. It's the same all over the world.

Ben Sherwood

#79. I know you are afraid; you are afraid to get hurt again. But I also know that you are not meant to grieve forever.

Christina Rasmussen

#80. A tragedy need not have blood and death; it's enough that it all be filled with that majestic sadness that is the pleasure of tragedy.

Jean Racine

#81. We think birth is a miracle and death is a tragedy, but really they're flip sides of the same coin - anything born is gonna die.

Mario Van Peebles

#82. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.

Raymond Chandler

#83. It was always a delicate balance, life and death, comedy and tragedy.

Chris Kyle

#84. When tragedy comes like this, at first it is complete. You do not need to think it over, or decide what it means. For it is far ahead of you, and the very act of acknowledging it means letting it go. But then it comes round again - and it goes through you and is worse than before.

Benjamin Lytal

#85. The basis of tragedy is man's helplessness against disease, war and death; the basis of comedy is man's helplessness against vanity (the vanity of love, greed, lust, power).

Dawn Powell

#86. My book 'Trust Your Heart', which is the story of my life, will be followed by 'Singing Lessons', a memoir of love, loss, hope, and healing, which talks about the death of my son and the hope that has been the aftermath of the healing from that tragedy.

Judy Collins

#87. TEIRESIAS:
You have your eyes but see not where you are
in sin, nor where you live, nor whom you live with.
Do you know who your parents are? Unknowing
you are enemy to kith and kin
in death, beneath the earth, and in this life.

Sophocles

#88. Fifty million people die every year, six thousand die every hour, and over one hundred people die every minute. But when thousands of people die in the same place and at the same time, we are more likely to wonder why God would allow such a thing to happen.

Steve Farrar

#89. Upon the death of her mother-in-law, Elearnor Roosevelt said, It is truly a tragedy of life to have spent 35 years with someone and upon her death, not to give it a second thought.

Eleanor Roosevelt