Tragic Quotes - Page 27

• 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

  Believe, Magic, Stories

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• The personal lives of painters are tragic and inevitable and do not explain the artist. For the artist is his work and no longer human.

  Sam Francis

  Artist, Inevitable, Painter

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• Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.

  Barnett Newman

  Dream, Communication, Men

  Barnett Newman, John Philip O'Neill (1992). “Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews”, p.158, Univ of California Press

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• The Sentence has no end. Sometimes I think it had no beginning. Now I salute its authors, which means all of us. You have made a wild, precious, awful, delicious, lovable, tragic, vulgar, fearsome, divine thing.

  Douglas Davis

  Mean, Thinking, Awful

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• He's the best of us. The best of our best, the best that each of us will ever build or ever love. So pray for this Guardian of our growth and choose him well, for if he be not truly blessed, then our designs are surely frivolous and our future but a tragic waste of hope. Bless our best and adore for he doth bear our measure to the Cosmos.

  John Steakley

  Blessed, Design, Growth

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• One of the tragic ironies of history is that such original and creative geniuses as Buddha and Jesus have been extolled as perfect patterns for all to emulate. In the very struggle to be like someone else rather than to be one's own true self, or to do one's own best in one's own environment, a child is in danger of losing the pearl that is really beyond price - the integrity of his (or her) own soul.

  Sophia Lyon Fahs

  Jesus, Children, Integrity

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• Don't think that the lack of leaders and of a party ideological line means anarchy, if by anarchy you mean chaos, bedlam, and pandemonium. What a tragic lack of political imagination to think that leaders and centralized structures are the only way to organize effective political projects!

  Michael Hardt

  Party, Mean, Thinking

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• War and it's tragic repercussions are inclusive of all; surely a model for peace should strive for such inclusiveness.

  Prince Hassan bin Talal

  War, Strive, Should

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• Accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities. The tragic plot must not be composed of irrational parts.

  Aristotle

  Philosophical, Plot, Poet

  'Poetics' ch. 24, 1460a

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• Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

  James A. Baldwin

  One Day, Earth, Lasts

  "Letter from a Region in My Mind" by James Baldwin, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

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• I think it's tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Thinking, Years, Joy

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• And I thought my loss was not, certainly, the end of the world, but to lessen the enthusiasm of those young people who were signed up, I thought that was tragic.

  Birch Bayh

  Loss, People, World

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• Without whining and without making myself a tragic figure, there is no replacement for the loss of your privacy. It's a huge sacrifice.

  David Duchovny

  Loss, Sacrifice, Privacy

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• I made strength from everything that had happened to me, so that in the end even the final tragedy could not defeat me. And that is what Ultima tried to teach me, that the tragic consequences of life can be overcome by the magical strength that resides in the human heart. --Antonio

  Rudolfo Anaya

  Heart, Tragedy, Overcoming

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• If you start out with a tragic view of life, then anything since is just a bonus.

  Freeman Dyson

  Views, Bonus, Ifs

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• She can't keep writing about what a tragic little hero I am, it'll get boring.

  J. K. Rowling

  Hero, Writing, Littles

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• The world exists on thousands of different levels and just because some are more tragic than others, it doesn't make them any more valid. You fall into that way of thinking and you become so overwhelmed by the world's suffering, you go mad.

  Bella Pollen

  Fall, Thinking, Mad

  Bella Pollen (2011). “Midnight Cactus”, p.276, Pan Macmillan

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• When people affected by epilepsy are reluctant to expose their condition, the public remains in the dark about it - a tragic irony that has made patient care and raising funds for research more than challenging.

  Lynda Resnick

  Dark, Epilepsy, People

  "Help Us Bring Epilepsy Out of the Shadows" by Lynda Resnick, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 21, 2010.

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• I know that you're selfish, selfish beyond words, and I know that you haven't the nerve of a rabbit, I know you're a liar and a humbug, I know that you're utterly contemptible. And the tragic part is'--her face was on a sudden distraught with pain--'the tragic part is that notwithstanding I love you with all my heart.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Pain, Selfish, Women

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• It's tragic that you can define a whole movement in music by gender alone. People are like, 'Oh, look, another quirky girl.'

  Paloma Faith

  Girl, People, Quirky

  "Paloma Faith: Causing a stir". Interview with Eleanor Morgan, www.theguardian.com. September 11, 2009.

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• But when you lose a family member or something tragic happens, that stays with you forever. You never get over it. Knowing that you have to deal with that for the rest of your life... Football is important, but not as important as you once thought it was.

  Brett Favre

  Sports, Football, Knowing

  "Sunday Conversation: Brett Favre". Ign Sports Interview, www.espn.com. 24 November 2004.

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• July 13, 1954 was the most tragic day of my life. I had lost my beloved Frida forever. To late now I realized that the most wonderful part of my life had been my love for Frida.

  Diego Rivera

  Lost Love, Happy Friday, Artist

  Deborah Kent, Diego Rivera (2005). “Diego Rivera: Painting Mexico”, Childs World Incorporated

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• Life is tragic but it's equally comic.

  John Banville

  Life Is, Comic

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• It seems so tragic to me that so many filmmakers are making movies up against this extra-ordinary revolution with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs.

  Peter Greenaway

  Eye, Hands, Two

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• Job was the greatest of all the children of the east, and his afflictions were well-nigh more than he could bear; but even if we imagined them wearing him to death, that would not make his story tragic.

  Andrew Coyle Bradley

  Jobs, Children, East

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