Tragic Quotes

“I found him between a reality and a nightmare.”
― Shannon A. Thompson, Take Me Tomorrow

“Dear Matthew-
There's one more thing I didn't get to tell you that night in my bedroom. Here it is: I love you. I'm in love with you. I have been for a long time. This might seem like a strange thing for me to say given the fact we aren't speaking to each other. But I've decided that it's possible to love someone for entirely selfless reasons, for all of their flaws and weaknesses, and still not succeed in having them love you back. It's sad perhaps, but not tragic, unless you dwell forever in the pursuit of their elusive affections.”
― Cammie McGovern, Say What You Will

“I still think that everyone's life, no matter how unremarkable, has a singular tragic encounter after which everything that really matters will happen. That moment is the catalyst - the first step in the equation. But knowing the first step will get you nowhere - it's what comes after that determines the result.”
― Robyn Schneider, The Beginning of Everything

“Walking alone is not difficult but when we have walked a mile worth a thousand years with someone then coming back alone is what is difficult.”
― Faraaz Kazi, Truly, Madly, Deeply

“People will go through their entire lives justifying every damn decision…they’ll fight for all the wrong things, until finally the right thing stares at them square in the face. That’s when the choices start to matter. Because in the end, you’re a creature of habit. So you may want to choose right, but choose wrong in the end — because you’re so damn used to it. It’s tragic, then again, life’s tragic”
― Rachel Van Dyken, Toxic

“If we could only get rid of consciousness. What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. To be part of the animal kingdom under the conditions of this earth is very well--but as soon as you know of your slavery, the pain, the anger, the strife--the tragedy begins. We can't return to nature, since we can't change our place in it. Our refuge is in stupidity [...] There is no morality, no knowledge, and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that [...] is always but a vain and floating appearance.”
― Joseph Conrad

“Someone experiencing the stages of grief is rarely aware of how his behavior might appear to others. Grief often produces a “zoom lens effect,” in which the focus is entirely on oneself, to the exclusion of external considerations.”
― Sol Luckman, Snooze: A Story of Awakening

“If a man cries in front of you, it doesn't mean he's weak. It means that he trusts you enough to let his guard down.”
― Faraaz Kazi, Truly, Madly, Deeply

“You look beautiful and tragic, just the way a heroine should on the eve of battle. Like Joan of Arc in her silver armor.”
― Melissa de la Cruz, Gates of Paradise

“For a moment, Blake said nothing. After chewing on her venom for a moment, he shrugged. “I would rather you hate me for who I am than love me for who I’m not.”
― Tanya Kaley, Lady Highwayman

“In past wars only homes burnt, but this time
Don't be surprised if even loneliness ignites.
In past wars only bodys burnt, but this time
Don't be surprised if even shadows ignite.”
― Sahir Ludhianvi

“The whiskey was a good start. I got the idea from Dylan Thomas. He's this poet who drank twenty-one straight whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern in New York and then died on the spot from alcohol poisoning. I've always wanted to hear the bartender's side of the story. What was it like watching this guy drink himself out of here? How did it feel handing him number twenty-one and watching his face crumple up before the fall of the stool? And did he already have number twenty-two poured, waiting for this big fat tip, and then have to drink it himself after whoever came took the body away?”
― Michael Thomas Ford, Suicide Notes

“The most tragic cause of social disharmony is when the speed with which people find mistakes of others outweighs their simple belief that they too are infallible!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“Life is magical. If life had no magic, it would be tragic.”
― Debasish Mridha

“And if there is one last thing I would have you know before we reach these final pages, it's that sometimes, no matter how hard we try, no matter how hard we want it to be so, sometimes there is no such a thing as happy ending.

This is my ending. This is how i burn.”
― T.J. Klune, Burn

“And because she worshipped joy, Kira seldom laughed and did not go to see comedies in theaters. And because she felt a profound rebellion against the weighty, the tragic, the solemn, Kira had a solemn reverence for those songs of defiant gaiety.”
― Ayn Rand, We the Living

“Souls soar high above reach,
Hands extend but never touch,
Words exchanged in dulcet tones,
Tis a fated moment to understand one's truth,
Time to let go.”
― Truth Devour, Wantin

“Ang mga sagot ngayo'y baon-baon mo na sa kung saan ka man papunta. Sa paglisan mo ngayon, hindi ka na talaga babalik. Babalik ka man sa aking isip, nakaapak pa rin ako sa lupa kung saan bawat buhos ng ulan ay magsisimula akong mangarap muli. Ako na lang, mag-isa.”
― Don Vittorio C. Villasin

“Marena," he said with an effort, "Marena...." He did not recognize her. His voice failed.”
― Felix Salten, Bambi: A Life in the Woods

“Science is rooted in the will to truth. With the will to truth it stands or falls. Lower the standard even slightly and science becomes diseased at the core. Not only science, but man. The will to truth, pure and unadulterated, is among the essential conditions of his existence; if the standard is compromised he easily becomes a kind of tragic caricature of himself.”
― Max Wertheimer

“In a fit of anger he had said to her, "You'll always be miserable," to which she thoughtfully replied, "Is that so? It's impossible to be miserable when you've known tragedy and hardship. Both strengthen and refine a person to the point where they may have moments of grief and sadness, but misery is known only to those who have a sense of entitlement...you know, people like you.”
― Donna Lynn Hope

“At times it's like sadness has planted itself on her face, refusing to leave, an overwhelming sadness, and sometimes I see despair there, too.”
― Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road

“The very same thing, don't you see, may be looked at tragically, and turned into a misery, or it may be looked at simply and even humorously. Possibly you are inclined to look at things too tragically.”
― Tolstoy, Leo, Anna Karenina

“{On the death of Hale's esteemed friend and fellow scientist, Luther Burbank. Burbank was much beloved by the population unil in an interview he revealed that he was an atheist. After this, the public turned on him and sent him thousands of letters with death threats. This upset the kind-hearted Burbank, who tried to amiably reply to each letter, so much that it ultimately led to his death}

. . . he was misled into believing that logic, kindliness, and reason could convince and help the bigoted.

He fell sick. The sickness was fated to be his last.

What killed Luther Burbank, at just that time and in just that abrupt and tragic fashion, was his baffled, yearning, desperate effort to make people understand. His desire to help them, to clarify their minds, and to induce them to substitute fact for hysteria drove him beyond his strength. He grew suddenly old attempting to make reasonable a people which had been unreasonable through twenty stiff-necked generations. . .

He died, not a martyr to truth, but a victim of the fatuity of blasting dogged falsehood.”
― Wilbur Hale

“Yet despite...accommodations with commerce, Möser regarded the market as primarily a threat--to the artisanal citizens of the town, to the traditional wants of the peasantry, and to the political structure to society, since it created a growing class of people outside the traditional paternalistic relations of the countryside. Möser's conception of contemporary political and economic trends in Osnabrück was essentialy tragic and tinged with that idealization of the past that would later be called romantic. Möser's heroes were the artisan-citizen and the independent peasant, his villains the shopkeeper and the peddler.”
― Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought

“The Comtesse's fellow prisoners in this antechamber to death were characteristic of the ill-assorted gatherings thrown together in Revolutionary prisons: duchesses and prostitutes, actresses and politicians: the Duchesse de Crequy-Montmorency and Madame Roland; Madame du Barry and Madame Brissot; the random debris of a sunken ship thrown together for a moment by the tide of fortune and a moment later violently dispersed. All of them were already ghosts, standing on the shoreline of the last limits of life, waiting their turn for Charon and his grim tumbrel to ferry them across the Styx.”
― Stanley Loomis

“For a dream to die, something so tragic would have definitely gone wrong! Be careful you don’t kill your own dreams.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Shaping the dream

“—Elígeme —susurré—. Porque, ¿mi corazón? ¿Mi alma? ¿Mi maldita existencia? Ya han hablado y te quieren, y únicamente a ti… para siempre." -Chase”
― Rachel Van Dyken, Elect

“...I was there when we opened the gates. Some of these poor wretches running out were so emaciated they actually died from the excitement of being liberated. I saw it happen several times.

These people in the camps – they were like walking skeletons. You could see all their bones.

The gates opened and the people ran out yelling, "I'm free! I'm free!" And some of them died right there. I was horrified to see what the SS had done to these people.

- Roy Gates”
― Marcus Brotherton, We Who Are Alive and Remain: Untold Stories from the Band of Brothers

“His was a psychological and emotional disturbance of untold, awful depth, mundane and yet tragic in that very ordinariness.”
― John Connolly, The Wolf in Winter