Tragedy Quotes

My efforts to prevent closing of the gold window-working through Connally, Volcker, and Shultz-do not seem to have succeeded. The gold window may have to be closed tomorrow because we now have a government that is incapable, not only of constructive leadership, but of any action at all. What a tragedy for mankind! ~ Arthur F. Burns

There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies. ~ Oscar Wilde

Dad's voice falters as he says goodbye. He is choking down his own grief to protect Mum, I know. He loves her deeply. I accept that he is incapable of expressing all this, and I am incapable of even saying the right thing, should he ever do so. And lurking deeper, is the knowledge that he has been here, himself. When I was aged about 5, his father - my grandfather - had cancer and took his own life by walking into the sea. My dad found his body under a jetty. What would it have been like to experience that tragedy? And then, to try and live, to go on raising a family, with those images haunting you? ~ Linda Collins

It's a tragedy what is happening, what Bush is doing. All Bush wants is Iraqi oil. There is no doubt that the U.S. is behaving badly. Why are they not seeking to confiscate weapons of mass destruction from their ally Israel? This is just an excuse to get Iraq's oil. ~ Nelson Mandela

Why did so many teenagers fall for Stanley Horowitz's tricks?"
"These were impressionable teenagers," Nick explained. "Many of them were devoted fans of romantic Vampyre stories. They over-romanticized what it means to be a Vampyre, and that gave Stanley a way to manipulate them."
"I've read Twilight," Tamara said. "My daughter is a huge fan. Is she in any danger?"
"The danger arises from wanting to belong to the in crowd so badly, you lose sight of what's real and what's fantasy."
"Surely today's teenagers know that vampires are fantasy," Tamara said.
"Possibly. But remember, Vampyres are not romantic. Vampyres are dead. They are walking reminders of tragedy. Loving one is necrophilia. And wanting to be one is the first step on the road to catastrophe. ~ Abramelin Keldor

Whether the color of your skin is black, white, yellow, brown or purple
the extent of this tragedy is so incredibly devastating that we had to do something. ~ Bert McCracken

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

This, for Homer, is the tragedy of being human: to desire freedom, and be tortured by a sense of autonomy, and yet be imprisoned by forces beyond our control. ~ Kenan Malik

When I was a little girl,' I said, sitting down, 'the wallpaper in my room had pictures of Noah's story.' [ ... ]
You know what's weird though? It's weird that the ark would be such a kids' story, you know? I mean, it's ... really a story about death. Every person who isn't in Noah's family? They die. Every animal, apart from two of each on the boat? They die. They all die in the flood. Billions of creatures. It's the worst tragedy ever,' I finished, my voice tied off by a knot in my chest.[ ... ] 'What the hell,'I said, 'pardon my language, was that doing on my wallpaper? ~ Adam Rex

I understand more than I want to. People act like love is a gift, but it's not. It's theft. It's a goddamn tragedy. Love is losing a vital organ to a man who will never give his in return. ~ Skye Warren

Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom the South had built an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today, erected on cheap colored labor and raising raw material for manufacture. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

I was doing research on the Mormon handcart tragedy when I came across information about Brigham Young sending out missions to the Indians in 1855. ~ David Roberts

Bad things happen to everyone. No one by their behavior can store up any immunity from disaster or tragedy. All any of us can control is how we respond when tough times come. This does not diminish God or his sovereignty in my mind. ~ Janice Cantore

Truth be told, even with Sophronia's arm muscles, vampires could hurl her a great deal farther than Sophronia could hurl vampires. A great tragedy of life, no doubt. The ~ Gail Carriger

Don't leave me", "Don't go away", "Don't forget me"... it seems to me, a tragedy, that these words so divine are the words that everyone is trained to never say. We are trained to never say and to never listen, to these words. These are the sentiments we were born into this world with as infants, the purest form of soul, the same sentiments we are trained to murder in ourselves and in others. We wage a war against what it means to be alive and then we wonder why we're killing ourselves. If I say these things to someone, and they still leave me, I have not lost anything because I have truly lived. ~ C. JoyBell C.

It's always the same old problem: how to find ourselves in the great yammering of ego and tragedy and discomfort and obsession with everyone else's destinies. ~ Anne Lamott

Tragedy is the highest form of art. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people. ~ Simon Wiesenthal

I was an utterance in absentia. I was a forgotten word, uttered and mislaid long ago. I was the word that existed because there was another word that was my opposite, and without it I was nothing. I gained meaning only by acknowledging that possible other.
Nida ~ Faiqa Mansab

It was just me and him, there in that place where tragedy had happened, where I thought my life had ended. But somehow, he made it seem like a home again.
Somehow, he gave it back to me. ~ T.J. Klune

It is majestic, this love affair of ours, so powerful and regal. It is the kind of love that fairtales are born of. The kind that often ends in tragedy. ~ Addison Moore

It's rare in Hollywood to get the chance to work on something that you actually care about. The tragedy of the place is all these talented people trying to get excited about stuff they themselves would only view at gunpoint. ~ Stephen Gaghan

We all look for meaning behind the tragedies that befall us. And sometimes the meaning is there. But sometimes, Master Bruce, terrible things just happen. No sinister plots. No secret societies. They just happen. ~ Batman Vs. Robin, Alfred

Sorel's basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy. It was as good as sealing yourself into a dungeon. Walled in, with nowhere to go but your own doom.
Walls.
A world completely surrounded by walls. ~ Haruki Murakami

It is what we see when we imagine what the afterlife must be like: our happiest triumphs, our most sincere moments, stolen from the seam of our lives, a respite just before the onset of imminent tragedy. ~ Joe Meno

Life is a tragedy filled with suffering and despair and yet some people do manage to avoid jury duty. ~ Woody Allen

The worst thing is to feel that as a photographer I'm benefiting from someone else's tragedy. This idea haunts me. It's something I have to reckon with every day, because I know that if I ever allow genuine compassion to be overtaken by personal ambition, I will have sold my soul. The only way I can justify my role is to have respect for the other person's predicament. The extent to which I do that is the extent to which I become accepted by the other and to that extent I can accept myself. ~ James Nachtwey

The place of horror turns out to be no more than a green scoop, sometimes shadowed, sometimes shining with the bilberries and grass within it, as if a mouth had opened from which streamed a beam of light. So my uncle Robert's death, which had looked from a distance to be an all-consuming tragedy was, close-up, the story of a man finding release from his pain and how his brother had showed such defiant love. The past was a grave, a trap - and yet, also neither of these. Just light, coming and going.
At the wolf pit you imagine you will stare into a hole littered with bones, but what draws you to that place is not what you take from it. The wolf pit seems a delicate illusion. You walk towards it; there is nothing, just a curve of the moor; then it is a soft green light, and then it is nothing again. ~ Will Cohu

Good pictures. Tragedy and violence certainly make powerful images. It is what we get paid for.But there is a price extracted with every such frame: some of the emotion, the vulnerability, the empathy that makes us human, is lost every time the shutter is released. ~ Greg Marinovich

I don't believe in charmed lives. I think that tragedy is part of the lesson you learn to lift yourself up, to pick yourself up and to move on. ~ Charlize Theron

The tragedy of government welfare programs is not just wasted taxpayer money but wasted lives. The effects of welfare in encouraging the break-up of low-income families have been extensively documented. The primary way that those with low incomes can advance in the market economy is to get married, stay married, and work - but welfare programs have created incentives to do the opposite. ~ Michael Tanner

The hill of comfort is the hill of Calvary; the house of consolation is built with the wood of the cross; the temple of heavenly blessing is founded upon the riven rock--riven by the spear which pierced his side. No scene in sacred history ever gladdens the soul like Calvary's tragedy. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The tragedy in life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. ~ Benjamin Mays

A formula for comedy is comedy equals tragedy plus time. A difficult or uncomfortable situation takes place, and then you laugh about it later down the road. ~ Brian Regan

I have been asked whether I would agree that the tragedy of the scientist is that he is able to bring about great advances in our knowledge, which mankind may then proceed to use for purposes of destruction. My answer is that this is not the tragedy of the scientist; it is the tragedy of mankind. ~ Leo Szilard

The greatest tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that everyone knows how it will end. We will divide up the region. ~ Yair Lapid

The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you're faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking. ~ James Patterson

There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs
of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register
their names, why was that. When the government finally built camps it only allowed for six thousand families to remain in the state, dispersing the
others around the country where they would be invisible and impotent, why was that. The camps at Purkhoo, Muthi, Mishriwallah, Nagrota were built
on the banks and beds of nullahas, dry seasonal waterways, and when the water came the camps were flooded, why was that. The ministers of the
government made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal
migrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that. The tents provided for the refugees to live in were often uninspected and
leaking and the monsoon rains came through, why was that. When the one-room tenements called ORTs were built to replace the tents they too
leaked profusely, why was that. There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensaries
lacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe five
thousand deaths because of int ~ Salman Rushdie

What did you do to this?' he asked in a horrorstruck voice.
'It didn't want to come out of the dashboard.'
'So you felt the need to torture it?'
'You know how I am with tools. No pain was inflicted intentionally.'
He shook his head, his face a mask of faux tragedy. 'You killed it. ~ Stephenie Meyer

Thus on Easter we celebrate Christ's Resurrection as something that happened and still happens to us. For each one of us received the gift of that new life and the power to accept it and to live by it. It is a gift which radically alters our attitude toward everything in this world, including death. It makes it possible for us joyfully to affirm: "Death is no more!" Oh, death is still there, to be sure and we still face it and someday it will come and take us. But it is our whole faith that by His own death Christ changed the very nature of death, made it a passage - a "passover," a "Pascha" - into the Kingdom of God, transforming the tragedy of tragedies into the ultimate victory. "Trampling down death by death," He made us partakes of His Resurrection. This is why at the end of the Paschal Matins we say: "Christ is risen and life reigneth! Christ is risen and not one dead remains in the grave! ~ Alexander Schmemann

The true tragedy in most people's lives is that they are far better than they imagine themselves to be and, as a result, end up being much less than they might be. ~ Earl R. Smith II

Not long ago, after my last trip to Russia, I had a conversation with an American very eminent in the field of politics. I asked what he read, and he replied that he studied history, sociology, politics and law.

"How about fiction - novels, plays poetry?" I asked.

"No," he said, "I have never had time for them. There's so much else I have to read."

I said, "Sir, I have recently visited Russia for the third time and don't know how well I understand Russians; but I do know that if I only read Russian history I could not have had the access to Russian thinking I have had from reading Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Turgenev, Sholokhov, and Ehrenburg. History only recounts, with some inaccuracy, what they did. The fiction tells, or tries to tell, why they did it and what they felt and were like when they did it."

My friend nodded gravely. "I hadn't though of that," he said. "Yes, that might be so; I had always thought of fiction as opposed to fact."

But in considering the American past, how poor we would be in information without Huckleberry Fin, An American Tragedy, Winesburg, Ohio, Main Street, The Great Gatsby, and As I Lay Dying. ~ John Steinbeck

As Christians, we can have peace even in the face of all the tragedy happening around us. Jesus made a promise to His disciples and to us as well. He was going back to the Father, but He was giving us a priceless gift. He gave us His peace. The world can never give us the peace that Jesus gives. It's a peace that we, the recipients, can't even understand. It's too wonderful for our minds to grasp, but we know it comes from Him. Whatever is happening in your world, Christ can give you peace. None of the problems you're facing are too big for Him, whether it's trouble in the city where you live or pain in your own home. He is saying to you, "don't let your heart be troubled about these things, and don't be afraid. ~ Various

You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations - to try to impose some order on the chaos, and make sense out of that which seems senseless. ~ Barack Obama

You could wonder for hours what flowers mean, but for me, they're life itself, in all its happy brilliance. We couldn't do with out flowers. Flowers help you forget life's tragedies. ~ Marc Chagall

Today is built on tragedies, which no one wants to face, nightmares to humanities and morally disgraced. Tonight is filled with rage, violence in the air, children bred with ruthlessness because no one at home cares. ~ Tupac Shakur

Yet, after some time, he wearied of them, and would sit in his box at the opera, either alone or with Lord Henry, listening in rapt pleasure to "Tannhauser" and seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul. ~ Oscar Wilde

Today, few Americans born after 1980 are familiar with the Jonestown tragedy, although anyone with an Internet connection can listen to the haunting tape of the community's mass extinction. And while the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" has entered the cultural lexicon, its reference to gullibility and blind faith is a slap in the face of the Jonestown residents who were goaded into dying by the lies of Jim Jones, and, especially insulting to the 304 murdered children. As the FBI files clearly document, the community devolved into a living hell from which there was no escape. ~ Julia Scheeres

Uncertainty is everywhere. But I am living in the midst of the uncertainty and risk, amid things that can and do bring physical destruction, because I am running from things that can destroy my soul, complacency, comfort and ignorance. I am much more terrified of living a comfortable life in a self serving society and failing to follow Jesus than I am of any illness or tragedy. ~ Katie J. Davis

instead of mourning, instead of a moment of silence or a hateful, islamophobic message, how about today we make the world a little brighter?
be kinder. be a little gentler, with yourself and others. take more pictures. tell more jokes. be a better human.
today is a lot more than a tragedy. today is a birthday. a day of suicide awareness. a wedding. a birth. a new job. today is a kiss and someone on a tarred over warehouse roof whispering about the day the earth stood still and the day it began spinning again.
be kind. just be kind. it's time we took this day back for the wild ones, for the fiery eyes, for the happy and the brave and the new. no more mourning. let it just be a sunday. ~ Taylor Rhodes

All suffering goes just as it came. So it is with the glories and tragedies of the world. ~ Paulo Coelho

I love Shakespeare. In Shakespeare, tragedy is not just something that's bad. It's something that could be good and is bad. ~ Rafe Esquith

Around the hero, everything becomes a tragedy.
Around God, everything becomes what? a world? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

It is sad but true that sometimes we need the tragedy to help us to see how human we are and how we are more alike than we are different. ~ Maya Angelou

Right now he needed to concentrate on keeping himself under control. Inside, his gut churned. There was a war going on. The joy of holding his son again clashed with the waves of anger that rose higher and higher with each passing moment. He thought he had known why Pete had arrived at the farm. He had pushed the fork into the soil and watched the earth turn over sure that the truth of their tragedy was about to be laid before them. He had watched the dry earth give up the rich brown soil and wanted to stay there forever in the cold garden just watching his fork move the earth. He had not wanted to hear what Pete had to say. And now this..this..What did you call this? A miracle? What else could it be? But this miracle was tainted. He was not holding the same boy he had taken to the Easter Show.
This thin child with shaved hair was not the Lockie he knew. Someone had taken that child. They had taken his child and he could feel by the weight of him they had starved him. Someone had done this to him. They had done this and god knew what else. Doug walked slowly into the house, trying to find the right way to break the news to Sarah.
She was lying down in the bedroom again. These days she spent more time there than anywhere else. Doug walked slowly through the house to the main bedroom at the back. It was the only room in the house whose curtains were permanently closed.
How damaged was his child? Would he ever be the same boy they had taken up to the Show ? Wha ~ Nicole Trope

Only when we fix our gaze on the heavenly things do we begin to understand the eternities. Only with the help of Christ can we fully overcome tragedy. It is necessary to develop our faith in Him as the Redeemer of the world. He taught us: In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. ~ CARLOS H. AMADO

Death isn't a tragedy to God, only to those left behind. ~ Patricia Briggs

LORD ILLINGWORTH. I never intend to grow old. The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. MRS. ALLONBY. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy. LORD ~ Oscar Wilde

The temple, in its standing there, first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves. This view remains open as long as the work is a work, as long as the god has not fled from it. It is the same with the sculpture of the god, a votive offering of the victor in the athletic games. It is not a portrait whose purpose is to make it easier to realize how the god looks; rather, it is a work that lets the god himself be present and thus is the god himself. The same holds for the linguistic work. In the tragedy nothing is staged or displayed theatrically, but the battle of the new gods against the old is being fought. The linguistic work, originating in the speech of the people, does not refer to this battle; it transforms the people's saying so that now every living word fights the battle and puts up for decision what is holy and what unholy, what lofty and what flighty, what master and what slave. ~ Martin Heidegger

Why does a tragedy like 9/11 change everything about air travel, but numerous gun massacres CHANGE NOTHING? ~ Justine Bateman

When the tragedy begins and the boat begins to sink I will do anything in my power to help save my mates if they reuse my help I have no choice but to jump ship to help myself ~ Ms. Bonnie Zackson Koury

The vagaries of the industry and show business itself would not lead one to conclude a lengthy career - because things change. Popularities come and go. The tragedy of it is that somebody like Robin Williams should suffer from that, and be driven to commit suicide. If ever there was an untimely, unfair death, it was him. ~ Chris Stein

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment. ~ Susan Sontag

I consider myself fortunate that photography exists, because otherwise I'd be stuck in the tragedy of ephemeralness that can come with installation art. ~ Sandy Skoglund

Either over neither, both over either/or, live-and-let-live over stand-or die, high spirits over low, energy over apathy, wit over dullness, jokes over homilies, good humor over jokes, good nature over bad, feeling over sentiment, truth over poetry, consciousness over explanations, tragedy over pathos, comedy over tragedy, entertainment over art, private over public, generosity over meanness, charity over murder, love over charity, irreplaceable over interchangeable, divergence over concurrence, principle over interest, people over principle. ~ Marvin Mudrick

I will miss myself in relation to others. The rareness. The exceptional differences. I will miss the gift that comes with hardship and paying the price. I will miss the tragedy of my own life. As I once spoke...emphatically, but I now repeat here, quietly - the pain, the pain is what made it so God damn beautiful. I endured. You can wait a lifetime for thirty seconds, five minutes, or for an hour to come into your life - a brief interval that makes all the suffering purposeful. In such moments of splendor and rapture - even if the rapture be stilled, the private hours and years of reckoning are unloaded, a burden lifted and the spirit feels as it did on the happiest day of its life when it was young and untormented Or rather, unconscious of the torment waiting to be ignited. ~ Wheston Chancellor Grove

The ability to understand and deliver comedy and tragedy is extremely rare in one composer. ~ Signe Baumane

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock The meat it feeds on. ~ William Shakespeare

When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. But, as a result, there is a tendency to overlook the way the war changed even the survivors' lives in ways impossible to predict. ~ Antony Beevor

I'm pretty squeaky clean. No big tragedies in my childhood or adolescence or adulthood. I've had a very easygoing, simple life. ~ Vera Farmiga

Like all good tragedies, this story begins with love. ~ K.A. Reynolds

I speak of a tragic optimism, that is, an optimism in the face of tragedy and in view of the human potential which at its best always allows for: (1) turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment; (2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and (3) deriving from life's transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

A child born to another woman calls me mom. The depth of the tragedy and the magnitude of the privilege are not lost on me. ~ Jody Landers

And by this very difference tragedy stands apart in relation to comedy, for the latter intends to imitate those who are worse, and the former better, than people are now. ~ Aristotle.

I am Cassandra - she who, without asking,
understood it all and still came to her fate,
I, Cassandra, full of visions,
who sees her own death without turning away,
and hears in the night the day that follows. ~ Gabriela Mistral

Dark circles under my eyes sink deeper and deeper into my skull, in contrast to my pale skin there is an undeniable resemblance to a fresh corpse. ~ Dee Remy

American children are the heaviest worldwide, and they are getting heavier at a faster rate than other children around the globe. This spread of obesity foreshadows an explosion in degenerative diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer waiting to erupt in our children's future. Together we can stop this tragedy from ever happening. ~ Joel Fuhrman

I am not the best :( but try to understand, this world is samll to swallow my thoughts :') , you let me free and find my world
:'D ~ Pratyush Singh

A great tragedy passes from crest to hollow of passion, rises and sinks again, as rhythmically as sea-waves. ~ Austin O'Malley

The greatest tragedy of life is not unanswered prayer, buy unoffered prayer. ~ F.B. Meyer

If you ignore the warning signs, a tragedy awaits you ahead. ~ Cory J. Herndon

And the self concern which is our torment, whether we know it or not, must find an antidote when we let our imagination stray over the human misery now in the world. The common lot of men binds us to each other and if we will, we may pluck virtue from tragedy. ~ Julie Summers

There were some tragedies that never should have happened but did. ~ Sue Wilder

Failure becomes success when it finds positive minds; Tragedy becomes melody when it lands in positive hands. With positivity, possibility is assured! ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Her death leaves me both depleted and emboldened. That's what tragedy does to you, I am learning. The sadness and wild freedom of it all impart a strange durability. I feel weathered and detached, tucking my head against the winds and trudging forward into life. ~ Claire Bidwell Smith

Die Welt ist nirgends außer diesen Mauern;
Nur Fegefeuer, Qual, die Hölle selbst.
Von hier verbannt, ist aus der Welt verbannt,
Und solcher Bann ist Tod: Drum gibst du ihm
Den falschen Namen. - Nennst du Tod Verbannung,
Enthauptest du mit goldnem Beile mich
Und lächelst zu dem Streich, der mich ermordet.


There is no world without Verona walls,
But purgatory, torture, hell itself.
Hence banishèd is banished from the world,
And world's exile is death. Then "banishèd"
Is death mistermed. Calling death "banishèd",
Thou cuttest my head off with a golden axe
And smilest upon the stroke that murders me.

Romeo: Act III, Scene 3 ~ William Shakespeare

The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men. ~ Albert Camus

Religion is the resolute following of the star of hope through triumphs and tragedies of time. ~ Eustace Haydon

The consciousness of an embryo is the universal consciousness. What we learn after birth is awareness and egocentric consciousness that we call the mind. Everyday we learn to conform to the beauty, tragedy, and adversity of this world and that forms our judgmental mind. ~ Debasish Mridha

In a small town, unexplained tragedy can only go so long before it grows teeth, sprouts sharp claws, and turns, snarling, on its own self. Before fragments of gossip become rumors, and the rumors become suspicions. Before neighbors start eyeing each other with the mistrustful narrowness of oft-kicked dogs. Inside the safe shelter of their homes, husbands and wives draw the blinds tight and turn to each other, worrying at small bits of information and wondering who, who among their shrinking circle of trusted friends, might still know something he isn't telling. ~ Kat Rosenfield

Roses aren't any less beautiful because they don't live long. No one looks at them and thinks, man, what a tragedy they'll only be around for a little while. You just appreciate them while they're there. Or if you don't, you're missing the point. ~ Sophie Cameron

I looked around the garden, the sun feeling warm on my back. "So why are you here? I would think you'd want to be as far away from a hurricane as possible."
She looked at me as if I'd just suggested streaking down the beach. It took her a moment to answer. "Because this is home." She wanted to see if the words registered with me, but I just looked back at her, not understanding at all.
After a deep breath, she looked up at a tall oak tree beyond the garden, its leaves still green against the early October sky, the limbs now thick with foliage. "Because the water recedes, and the sun comes out, and the trees grow back. Because" -she spread her hands, indicated the garden and the trees and, I imagined, the entire peninsula of Biloxi- "because we've learned that great tragedy gives us opportunities for great kindness. It's like a needed reminder that the human spirit is alive and well despite all evidence to the contrary." She lowered her hands to her sides. "I figured I wasn't dead, so I must not be done ~ Karen White

The peace we are offered is not a peace that is free from tragedy, illness, bankruptcy, divorce, depression, or heartache. It is peace rooted in the trust that the life Jesus gives us is deeper, wider, stronger, and more enduring than whatever our current circumstances are, because all we see is not all there is and the last word about us and our struggle has not yet been spoken. ~ Rob Bell

Even the broken will fight ~ D.P.Prior

A dream conceived from the inside-out eventually becomes reality. But a dream desired from the outside-in is subject to spoil and tragedy. ~ T.F. Hodge

I know we could accept the things we can't be for each other, and even turn it into the poetic tragedy of our lives. Or we could act. I want to act. I want this to happen. Kosi is a good ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

James hoped the newsletter would garner support from Bahana, or white people, to stop a town well that the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted to dig and a tower it wanted to erect to store the water. The Hotevilla elders were willing to lay down their lives in this battle. They'd done it before, preventing the BIA from bringing electricity to the village by lying down in front of bulldozers. If that well went in, James explained, people would waste water. Their spring would dry out- an unthinkable tragedy, as it would make it impossible for them to live there any longer. Could two cultures be any different? I now wondered. We were taking federal money to mine water and would do so until the unlikely day that same government made us stop. The Hopi had been trying to prevent the government from giving them a well in the first place. ~ Julene Bair

Disappointment means that things haven't worked out the way you wanted! And now what to do? Very simple: Stand up and walk! Cut the tragedy because our limited time must always be used for the forward movements! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Class certainly loomed large in Katrina's aftermath. Blacks of means escaped the tragedy; blacks without them suffered and died. In reality, it is how race and class interact that made the situation for the poor so horrible on the Gulf Coast. The rigid caste system that punishes poor blacks and other minorities also targets poor whites. ~ Michael Eric Dyson

The Exile In July 587 BCE, Babylonian soldiers broke through Jerusalem's walls, ending a starvation siege that had lasted well over a year. They burned the city and Solomon's temple and took its king and many other leaders to Babylon as captives, leaving others to fend for themselves in the destroyed land. Many surrounding countries disappeared altogether when similar disasters befell them. But Judah did not. Instead, the period scholars most often call the "Babylonian exile" inspired religious leaders to revise parts of Scripture that had been passed down to them. It also sparked the writing of entirely new Scriptures and the revision of ideas about God, creation, and history. Much of what is called the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament was written, edited, and compiled during and after this national tragedy. ~ Walter Brueggemann