Heroic Tragedy Quotes & Sayings

Heracles' heroic world and Deianeira's warmth and tenderness are mutually exclusive. Sophocles seeks not to vindicate the one against the other, but to dramatize the tragedy of their irreconcilability and their mutual destructiveness. — Charles Segal

I think art is not an ornament or refinement at the fringes of human intelligence, I think it's at the center. It's at the core. — Robert Pinsky

The tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself. The wrong is the condition which suppresses man, perverts the flowing out of his love and creative instinct. 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. — Arthur Miller

Want to get Chinese?"
"I though you cooked."
"Like I know how."
"That's my girl. — Susan Mallery

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. — Virginia Woolf

You see tragedy requires persons of heroic stature. It works on the principle of people being more than humansuper-humanand also being only too human. But there just aren't many great figures around now, so the tragic mechanisms can't work. — Martin Amis

Tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

There are a few times when the songs that are written, the poems that are written, the plays that are written, come alive. By accident you fall onto a stage-set put aside for a tragedy for the lesser gods, and you utter words that were in the script written in the leaves and in the grass for some heroic cast. — Sylvia Plath

Eliminate the overwhelming cost of phantom wars and fools' errands, and humankind might begin to balance its books. After all, its only debts are to itself. — Marilynne Robinson

She felt him tremble with the force of his need. He spoke just beneath her ear, his voice thick with tormented pleasure. You have to leave, Sara ... because I want to hold you like this until your skin melts into mine. I want you in my bed, the smell of you on my sheets, your hair spread across my pillow. I want to take your innocence. God! I want to ruin you for anyone else. — Lisa Kleypas

Reading was my way of not thinking about maths. More than that (or do I mean less?), it was my way of not thinking. — Ian McEwan

It was a tragic end to a heroic life. — Chris Kyle

I don't know how to have a normal relationship because I try to act normal and love from a normal place and live a normal life, but there is sort of an abnormal magnifying glass, like telescope lens, on everything that happens. — Taylor Swift

The part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or evil. If there was a woman in the story, she was a passive object of desire and rescue (a beautiful blond princess); active women (dark, witches) usually caused destruction or tragedy. Anyway, the stories weren't about the women. They were about men, what men did, and what was important to men. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism. — Susan Sontag

Death, so caused, may be mysterious, but what founds these lives is clear enough: the capacity to love, the strength to found a life upon a love. That the love becomes incompatible with that life is tragic, but that it is maintained until the end is heroic. People capable of such love could have removed mountains; instead it has caved in upon them. One moral of such events is obvious: if you would avoid tragedy, avoid love; if you cannot avoid love, avoid integrity; if you cannot avoid integrity, avoid the world; if you cannot avoid the world, destroy it. — Stanley Cavell