Tragic Quotes - Page 33

• Fortunately for the human race, pain, however piercing, is not a lasting emotion. The recollection of happiness lingers, but the consciousness never retains for long the first thrust of tragic loss. The details of daily life crowd in upon the mind.

  Wallis Simpson

  Pain, Loss, Race

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• 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

  History, Silence, Waste

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• The tragic thing about learning from experience is I fear that one can only learn from one's own experience. Other people's - other nations' - experiences simply do not help. They can be imaginatively learned from. But people do not act on other people's experiences.

  May Sarton

  People, Experience, Helping

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• The quest of the truth had been born in me - the most tragic and incomplete, as well as the most essential, of man's quests.

  Ida Tarbell

  Truth, Men, Essentials

  Ida M. Tarbell (2015). “All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography”, p.24, Ravenio Books

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• I sometimes think it's like a weird elastic band. The more tragic your work is, the quicker you snap back. There's a catharsis in telling a miserable old tale; you get rid of demons.

  Anne-Marie Duff

  Thinking, Catharsis, Band

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• The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies; but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.

  Jean Cocteau

  Enchantment, World, Fancy

  Jean Cocteau (1966). “The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles)”, p.84, New Directions Publishing

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• Southerners have many fine qualities, charm and civility among them, and a sense of the tragic.

  Dean Koontz

  Quality, Civility, Charm

  Dean Koontz (2014). “The Odd Thomas Series 7-Book Bundle: Odd Thomas, Forever Odd, Brother Odd, Odd Hours, Odd Apocalypse, Odd Interlude, Deeply Odd”, p.673, Bantam

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• When you're in a young band for the first time, geographically you're in the same place and you tend to go out and socialize. You play more shows, you spend more time together. You're a unit. As you grow older, inevitably you develop a life outside the band. I think it would be tragic if you didn't.

  Robert Smith

  Thinking, Play, Together

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• The anger that Uncle Junior has comes from my background. My father was the son of an Italian immigrant, and I've seen the fire of the Italian temperament. It can be explosive sometimes in ways that are both funny and tragic.

  Dominic Chianese

  Uncles, Father, Anger

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• Heart disease continues to be the number one killer; cancer, the number 2 killer, not far behind. The tragic aspect of these deadly diseases is that they could all be cured, I do believe, if we had sufficient funding.

  Arlen Specter

  Cancer, Believe, Heart

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• Any comic is a tragic soul. Comedy is one of the things that allows one to survive. Particularly if one has been in the process of separating off the emotions, it's one place you can process them.

  Twyla Tharp

  Soul, Comedy, Emotion

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• Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.

  Henry James, Sr.

  Spiritual, Flower, Night

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• ...human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their ignorance of the misuse.

  Robert Wright

  Ignorance, Moral, Equipment

  Robert Wright (2010). “The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology”, p.21, Vintage

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• I do feel ashamed of having participated to the slightest even as a tool in those dark days. But I was obliged to serve the state to which I had taken an oath. It was a tragic fate.

  Walther Funk

  Taken, Fate, Dark

  "The Nuremberg Interviews: Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses". Book by Leon Goldensohn, Random House, p. 85 (To Leon Goldensohn, April 14, 1946), 2010.

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• To us Germans everything is religion. What we do we do not merely with our hands and brains, but with our hearts and souls. This has often become a tragic fate for us.

  Baldur von Schirach

  Heart, Fate, Hands

  "The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership". Book by Joachim C. Fest, p. 220, 1999.

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• The path towards a free society has not been simple. There are tragic and glorious pages in our history.

  Vladimir Putin

  Simple, Pages, Path

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• By the respectable terms of the modern literary profession, novelists do not preach. And, in fact, there has probably not been a less respectable novelist among the irrefutably enduring writers of our time than Ayn Rand: philosopher queen of the best-seller lists in the forties and fifties, cult phenomenon and nationally declared threat to public morality in the sixties, guru to the Libertarians and to White House economic policy in the seventies, and a continuing exemplar or Wilde's tragic observation that more than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

  Claudia Roth

  Queens, White, House

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• Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.

  Salman Rushdie

  Religious, Real, Heart

  "Salman Rushdie condemns attack on Charlie Hebdo". www.englishpen.org. January 7, 2015.

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• The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.

  Dawn Powell

  Age, Ingredients, Dupes

  Dawn Powell (1998). “The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965”, Zoland Books

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• There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Believe, Feelings, Made

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• Indeed, Russia and the U.S. were allies during the two tragic conflicts of the Second and the First World Wars, which allows us to think there's something objectively bringing us together in difficult times, and I think - I believe - it has to do with geopolitical interests and also has a moral component.

  Vladimir Putin

  War, Believe, Thinking

  "Putin Q&A". "TIME" Interview, content.time.com. 2007.

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• If you have ever been in a real tragic or sad situation, the words that come out are hopelessly inadequate and kind of cliched.

  Erika Slezak

  Real, Hopeless, Kind

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• Sometimes in the most tragic situation, something just profoundly funny happens.

  David Hyde Pierce

  Sometimes, Situation, Happens

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• The key is just to ignore the pain, because physical comedy only works if you see someone get hurt and they aren't actually hurt. If someone gets hit in the face with a bat, falls down, and gets back up, it's funny. If they stay down and their jaw is wired shut in the next scene, it's really tragic and weird. You have to pretend it doesn't hurt.

  Chris Pratt

  Hurt, Pain, Fall

  "Parks and Recreation's Chris Pratt on the Hilarious Third Season and the Surprise of Rob Lowe". Interview with Christopher Rosen, movieline.com. January 26, 2011.

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• This is the room where Jezebel frescoed her eyelids with history's tragic glitter

  Tom Robbins

  Jezebel, Glitter, Rooms

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Skinny Legs and All”, p.9, Bantam

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