Quotes & Sayings About Tragic Stories

Love is reckless because true emotions are immune to logic. The most beautiful love stories are often the most tragic. — Jewel E. Ann

The world disappoints us all, and the ways we change our own stories to survive that disappointment are beautiful and tragic and hilarious. — Daniel Abraham

America, like England and Scotland, had never really been a gay nation. Rather, it had been heavily and noisily jocular, with a substratum of worry and insecurity, in the image of its patron saint, Lincoln of the rollicking stories and tragic heart. — Sinclair Lewis

My favorite monster has always been the zombie. They are so much fun. They can be scary, pathetic, sad, funny, tragic, even heroic. They are the most elastic monster because, even with all of that, they don't interfere with telling stories about the humans. They serve as threats and metaphors, but they allow the story to be about people. — Jonathan Maberry

My story follows a very classic tragic paradigm in which you learn things too late for them to be of any use, and by keeping silent about the thing that you're terrified of, you bring it about - and even worse. — Marco Roth

My writing is soaked with the tears of my heart, An invisible rebellion that no man can see. Let our life stories become tragic art. Oh, Mama, oh, sisters, hear me, hear me." The — Lisa See

Plato utterly condemns the poets for publishing trivial, false and indeed wicked stories about the gods, such as that they fight with each other, or are overcome by emotions like grief, anger, mirth. Reluctantly, he will not allow Homer in his Republic, and he is very angry with the tragic poets for spreading unworthy ideas of the Deity.

It may well be that there were inferior tragic poets who deserved Plato's strictures, but so far as concerns the tragic poets whom we know, Plato's attack is absurd. It is the attack of a severely intellectual philosopher who was also more of a poet than most poets have contrived to be; one who invented some of the profoundest and most beautiful of Greek myths. 'There is a long-standing quarrel', says Plato, 'between philosophy and poetry.' So there was, on the part of the philosophers, and most of all in Plato's own soul. — H.D.F. Kitto

Oh yes, it's very tragic. Why does everyone always like love stories? What about absence-of-love stories? Aren't they much more common? — Gabrielle Zevin

Joaquin Jackson's frank and colorful account of his long career as a modern-day Texas Ranger thrills like an action novel, yet the stories are true, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, but always gripping. I could hardly put the book down ... The writing is superb. — Elmer Kelton

Mafia landmarks are found everywhere in beautiful Sicily, an unfortunate byproduct of the island's tragic history. By mapping theses strange sites and telling the amazing stories behind them, I hope to remind readers that the Mafia is not a romantic relic of the past. — Carl Russo

There are stories that are true, in which each individual's tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it to deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others' pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to. — Neil Gaiman

It is tragic that some Christians have been so battered with stories of a prideful, vindictive God that they have fled from Jesus' fold. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

I spoke of the tragic illusion of perpetuity, but, no, my friends, it is a comic one. The ludicrous plot in which we are all trapped. The ancient Greeks referred to plot as mythos, attributing the random drift of human affairs to some sort of unknowable but glimpsable divine motion, attempting to attach a certain grandeur to it, the delusion of meaning. But we are characters who do not exist, in a story composed by no one from nothing. Can anything be more pitiable? No wonder we all are grieving. — Robert Coover

We had always talked easily and well, and as we carried our drinks away, I asked him what he thought there was in us that forced us to tell stories to ourselves about our own lives - to make up stories that had such an arbitrary resemblance to our actual living. Why did we pick certain dots and connect them and not others? Why did we find it so irresistible to make ourselves into tragic figures with tragic flaws which were responsible for our pain? Maybe unfortunate things just happened; maybe there was just bad luck. Why did it seem like our greatest failures were caused by perversions in our souls?

'Perhaps it's evolutionary,' he said. ' If we saw ourselves in realistic proportions - how tiny we are, and how little ability we have to avoid the suffering that's an inevitable part of life - maybe we would be too discouraged to survive.'

'Or maybe,' I said, 'the truth is so diffuse that our minds cannot even hold on to it. — Sheila Heti

We have all read tragic stories in our local papers about gun accidents as a result of misuse. As lawmakers we can better promote safety and responsibility by encouraging gun owners to purchase gun safes to store firearms and keep them from falling into the wrong hands. — Ron Lewis

To me Vivien Leigh was a tragic heroine of classic proportions: chosen, blessed and abandoned by the gods. Obstinately she tried to control and defy her destiny and to know her story is to be inspired by pity and terror. — Elaine Dundy

It was like those songs I'd heard as a child, each so familiar, and all mine. When i got older and realized the words were sad, the stories tragic, it didn't make me love them any less. By then they were already part of me, woven into my conciousness & memory — Sarah Dessen

If you're nice, decent, attractive, get good grades and are talented, no one wants to read about that ... They want to read what's out-of-the-ordinary, the scandalous, the shocking and the tragic. They want a story; they want to be captivated and what's typical does not give them that ... unless, of course, that person ends up a victim, commits a crime or loses their minds via a love affair. — Donna Lynn Hope

There is great nobility in ordinary people. The world disappoints us all, and the ways we change our own stories to survive that disappointment are beautiful and tragic and hilarious. On balance, I find much more to admire about humanity than to despise. — Daniel Abraham

I think above all else [The Social Network] is a love story. And something of a tragic one, I suppose. — Andrew Garfield

I think that it's so powerful for me to go see someone like Bridget Everett at Joe's Pub and watch her weave her songs in and out of these funny, tragic stories - you can talk and sing and it's not this horrible offense, you're going to get thrown in artistic jail. — Kathleen Hanna

I have my own stories. A few are known and some untold. Be a tragic one or a comedy one, stories are meant to end at a certain point. Stories ... teach us whether we are the option or we are comparing. — Upasana Banerjee

As Africans Americans we often think about the tragic stories associated with our lineage, but there are a lot of triumphs. Traveling helps you learn about other aspects of our history, like the story of Christ the Redeemer. It's empowering and inspiring. — Laz Alonso

The most common characteristic of women's history is to be lost and discovered, lost again and rediscovered, lost once more and re-rediscovered - a process of tragic waste and terrible silences that will continue until women's stories are a full and equal part of the human story. — Gloria Steinem

The lives and deaths of characters in stories and poems, however tragic, help us to learn about the world and - if we are brave enough - to change it. — Nicola Morgan

Ever since I was young, I've read Austen and the Brontes. My friends laugh, but those books are always so tragic and wonderful - those stories, they're just incredible. — Jessica Brown Findlay

Some stories are sudden like an inhale, some are overcoming like the tides, some, we name mistake, some are called lessons. Stories ... tragic, romantic, comedy. We make them, they make us . — Upasana Banerjee

We all have our pasts. I suspect we keep them nebulous not because we are hiding from our yesterdays but because we think we will cut more romantic figures if we roll our eyes and dispense delicate hints about beautiful women forever beyond our reaches. Those men whose stories I have uprooted are running from the law, not a tragic love affair. — Glen Cook

Yeah, but I don't know. There is something about the tragic stories of Shakespeare. It's as if we all know how it will end, but the adventure makes it worth it. — Brittainy C. Cherry

Kvothe continued, smiling himself "I see you laugh. Very well, for simplicity's sake, let us assume I am the center of creation. In doing this, let us pass over innumerable boring stories: the rise and fall of empires, sagas of heroism, ballads of tragic love. Let us hurry forward to the only tale of any real importance." His smile broadened. "Mine. — Patrick Rothfuss

There's no damsel with a tragic history in there? With a name like the Three Craftsmen, they each should build something awesome for a beautiful princess to try to win her favor and then two of them would die.> You must be thinking of stories from other cultures. Irish women tend to kick ass and do whatever they want. For exhibits A, B, and C, I give you the Morrigan, Brighid, and Flidais. — Kevin Hearne

Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories ... cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful. — G.K. Chesterton

I saw everyone, a shifting sea of discomfort and sadness, each person carrying his own pain, each telling her own stories, no story more or less tragic or triumphant than any other. — Jennifer Brown

Literature supplements the lives of people and enables us to feel connected with the world. Shared stories blunt a sense of tragic aloneness, and endow us with the tools to understand our humanness. Reading about the lives of other people acquaints us with the hardships of other people. The authorial voices of narrative prose express our shared feelings of deprivation — Kilroy J. Oldster

We must carefully cultivate the voice that speaks to us because an internal voice is the ultimate narrator of our charming and delightful personal story or the documentarian of our tragic and disgraceful plotlines. Stories that we tell ourselves become our functional reality, which format structures the concourse of the nested emotional control panel that guides and girds us through the din of the present. — Kilroy J. Oldster

A Tragic Honesty, like the Ian Hamilton biography of Lowell that I read recently, is a sad and occasionally terrifying account of how creativity can be simultaneously fragile and self-destructive; it also made me grateful that I am writing now, when the antidepressants are better, and we all drink less. Stories about contemporary writers being taken away in straitjackets are thin on the ground - or no one tells them to me, anyway - but it seemed to happen to Lowell and Yates all the time; there are ten separate page references under 'breakdowns' in the index of A Tragic Honesty. — Nick Hornby

To create anything - whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom - is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic - which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see. — Tom Bissell

The solution, of necessity, was going to be entirely up to him. Knowing it was a trifle over dramatic, but considering the mental capabilities of the two involved, he drew his sword. "We are all now going directly to the chapel," he announced, "and the two of you are going to get married." He pointed at the splintered door with the sword. "Now march!"he commanded.
And so it was that one of the great tragic love stories of all time came at last to a happy ending. Mandorallen and his Neria were married that very afternoon,with Garion quite literally standing over them with a flaming sword to insure that no last-minute hitches could interrupt. — David Eddings

The news media is so quick to pick up tragic stories of imperiled children that it seems like there are more terrible events today than ever before - when in fact it's quite the opposite. It is, in all manners possible to calculate, the safest time in the history of civilization to be a kid. — Gever Tulley

Amy might not have had the most exciting life over the past few years, up here in her room, but she must have been fighting death to the very end. Sara could understand why she had been in denial or so long. It must have been a frightening realization: so many books she would never get to pick up, so many stories that would happen without her, so many authors she would never get to discover.

That night, Sara sat in Amy's library for hours, thinking about how tragic it was that the written word was immortal while people were not, and grieving for her, the woman she had never met. — Katarina Bivald

back in the middle ages
they burned unruly women at the stake
and out of the ashes of their bones and flesh
rose the Enlightenment and Reason fresh
and the white men declared
there's no such thing as witches
they're just crazy psycho-bitches
but we certainly can't let them run free
lock 'em up and throw away the key
yeah they said: lock 'em up and throw away the key

cause there's nothing scarier than a woman mad and/or
aware of her own magic
tragic how much violence is done
in the name of science
to ensure our silence

in Victorian times they located suffering in our uterus
in the blood in the soft internal organs
took our pain our righteous rage
they called it 'hysteria'
and then Dr. Freud ignored women's horror stories
herstories of abuse and rape and
took a justified hatred of the penis and called it
envy (he sold more books that way) — Leah Harris

In sports, I refused to do any interviews that were just going to become human-interest stories. Don't turn me into a tragic heroine. — Aimee Mullins

It is the tragic story of the cultural crusader in a mass society that he cannot win, but that we would be lost without him. — Paul Lazarsfeld