Nothing I did contributed to me having cancer, so I can't sit back and say, 'Oh why me. ' Why not me? Why does tragedy always have to hit someone else?
There is a point in portraying surface vulgarity where tragedy and comedy are very close.
I couldn’t remember the last time I had stayed up into the squeaky hours of the night because I couldn’t put a book down, and that was a tragedy.
Gay icons usually have some tragedy in their lives, but I've only had tragic haircuts and outfits.
Tragedy turns into comedy when you watch your own drama and realizing it as a mind-created fiction designed to create you a sense of identity.
That is the mysterious thing about tragedy- it often strikes at the happiest moment.
The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide.
Few delights can equal the presence of one whom we trust utterly.
Do not measure the number of tragedies you sustain, but to quantify the success you derive from them.
Death brings release & removal from all evil, every tragedy & all difficulty. Death is not an enemy.
Doctor MacKenzie says "Sometimes I think the Victorians had the right idea. When you lost a family member back then you were suppose to be in full mourning, dress in nothing but black, for a whole year. Then you went into something they called 'half mourning' for another full year, adn during those two years, you were pretty much expected to have emotional breakdowns, you could do it whenever you felt you needed to, and everybody would support you. Now?, A month after a tragedy, maybe two, and you're expected to be all better-or down pills so you can pretend you are.
We had a branding problem. We have allowed ourselves to be branded by our tragedies. If you said 'Oklahoma City,' chances are the next word out of your mouth was 'bombing. '
It is a tragedy of the Germanic world that Jesus was Judaised, distorted, falsified; and an alien Asiatic spirit was forced upon us. That is a crime we must repair.
If enough people are sensitive to the tragedy of Tibet, I think it will produce a change politically as well. But furthermore, it's important for the people in Tibet. Now communication is such [that] people know what is happening. Even Tibetan people would know that the Interfaith or the international group of religious people - that everybody who is religious is taking up their cause. It would help them a lot if we give them courage, and that in itself is enough.
Look at Mann's reading habits, his explicit comments on Nietzsche, and his copy of Birth of Tragedy, and it starts to seem doubtful that this work of Nietzsche's played much role in the gestation of the novella.
It was a total and absolute surprise to find out that what was inside the concentration camps was a sea of skeletons. What is clear to me, therefore, is that while the tragedy of war grinds on, the contemporary aesthetics of the tragedy seem not only confused but, in some way, suspicious.
It is a characteristic of any decaying civilization that the great masses of the people are unconscious of the tragedy. Humanity in a crisis is generally insensitive to the gravity of the times in which it lives. Men do not want to believe their own times are wicked, partly because it involves too much self-accusation and principally because they have no standards outside of themselves by which to measure their times.
Here's the tragedy of the modern record business: It's radio. If you're not on radio, nobody really is going to hear you or see you or care about you.
Tragedy enlightens - and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies.
I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy