#Tragedy Quotes

“Death lies on her like an untimely frost.”

“I despised my arrival on this earth and I despise my departure; it is a tragedy.”

“A glooming peace this morning with it brings; The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head: Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things; Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished: For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

“There is a willow grows aslant a brook, That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream; There with fantastic garlands did she come Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them: There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke; When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook.”

“Then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely but too well, Of one not easily jealous but, being wrought, Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand, Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes, Albeit unused to the melting mood, Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees Their medicinable gum. Set you down this, And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by th' throat the circumcised dog And smote him thus.”

“Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer.”

“I kissed thee ere I killed thee. No way but this, Killing myself, to die upon a kiss.”

“We can only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy.”

“With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes -- one of the tragedies of married life.”

“Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours.”

“Tragedies come in the hungry hours.”

“Comedy is merely tragedy happening to someone else.”

“If I was white I would have been like John Wayne... I feel like a tragic hero in a Shakespeare play”

“Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.”

“So many other things for us to see, Things to be, Our history so full of tragedy and misery.”

“The extermination of the buffalo has been a veritable tragedy of the animal world.”

“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.”

“There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”

“Death is always, under all circumstances, a tragedy, for if it is not then it means that life has become one.”

“The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old but that one is young.”

“It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.”

“And I'm dying to know, is it killing you like it's killing me? And the story of us looks a lot like a tragedy now.”

“There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.”

“Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .”

“The trouble with the lower classes is that they lack the sense of tragedy given to them by the upper classes.”

“Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.”

“To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

“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.”

“There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.”

“Every woman becomes their mother. That's their tragedy. And no man becomes his. That's his tragedy.”

“In all love stories the theme is love and tragedy, so by writing these types of stories, I have to include tragedy.”

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

“There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies.”

“It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.”

“Here, everything is tragic through and through, and the will, that fain would shape a world according to its wish, at last can reach no greater satisfaction than the breaking of itself in dignified annulment.”

“The romantics would call this a love story, the cynics would call it a tragedy. In my mind it’s a little bit of both, and no matter how you choose to view it in the end, it does not change the fact that it involves a great deal of my life and the path I’ve chosen to follow.”

“There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted.”

“Life was a fairy-tale, then, it is a tragedy now. When I was 43 and John Hay 41 he said life was a tragedy after 40, and I disputed it. Three years ago he asked me to testify again: I counted my graves, and there was nothing for me to say. I am old; I recognize it but I don't realize it. I wonder if a person ever really ceases to feel young - I mean, for a whole day at a time.”

“Comedy is tragedy revisited or hostility. It is mock hostility, of course, or it would be ugly; we would have a war.”

“Comedy is tragedy revisited.”

“The romantics would call this a love story, the cynics would call it a tragedy.”

“The greater the love, the greater the tragedy when it's over.”

“Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.”

“For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.”

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

“It is sad but true that sometimes we need the tragedy to help us to see how human we are and how we are more alike than we are different.”

“Never regret thy fall, O Icarus of the fearless flight For the greatest tragedy of them all Is never to feel the burning light.”

“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”

“After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.”

“In tragedy great men are more truly great than in history. We see them only in the crises which unfold them.”