Tragic Poetry Quotes

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?"
Macbeth ~ William Shakespeare

Perhaps Aristotle's most widely-read work is his esoteric treatise on aesthetics, the Poetics. According to his analysis of tragic poetry (a section on comedy was either lost or never completed), the theatrical audience experiences katharsis ("purgation") of the heightened emotions of pity and fear as the tragic hero, a basically good but flawed aristocrat, is brought down by his own "error of judgment. ~ The New York Times

She slid a slim volume of poetry off the shelf and returned to her chair, swishing her rather unnattractive skirts before she sat down.
Benedict frowned. He'd never really noticed before how ugly her dress was. Not as bad as the one Mrs. Cabtree had lent her, but certainly not anything designed to bring out the best in a woman.
He ought to buy her a new dress. She would never accept it,of course, but maybe if her current garments were accidentally burned...
"Mr. Bridgerton?"
But how could he manage to burn her dress? She'd have to not be wearing it, and that posed a certain challenge in and of itself...
"Are you even listening to me?" Sophie demanded.
"Hmmm?"
"You're not listening to me."
"Sorry," he admitted. "My apologies. My mind got away from me. Please continue."
She began anew, and in his attempt to show how much attention he was paying her, he focused his eyes on her lips, which proved to be a big mistake.
Because suddenly those lips were all he could see, and he couldn't stop thinking about kissing her, and he knew- absolutely knew-that if one of them didn't leave the room in the next thirty seconds, he was going to do something for which he'd owe her a thousand apologies.
Not that he didn't plan to seduce her. Just that he'd rather do it with a bit more finesse.
"Oh, dear," he blurted out.
Sophie gave him an odd look. He didn't blame her. He sounded like a complete idiot. He didn't think he'd uttered t ~ Julia Quinn

If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways. ~ Arthur Koestler

I deeply regret that those with the authority and responsibility to deal appropriately with Brendan Smyth failed to do so, with tragic and painful consequences for those children he so cruelly abused. ~ Sean Brady

Form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. ~ Wendell Berry

Like, I have had moments, which I think most people have, where you'll be watching TV, and it'll be interrupted by some tragic event, and you'll actually find yourself thinking, 'I don't want to hear about this train being derailed! What happened to 'The Flintstones?' ~ Al Yankovic

I'll let you into my heart
but wipe your feet at the door. ~ Atticus Poetry

A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests. ~ John Dryden

At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them. You have to believe that poetry has some reach into reality itself, or you have to go silent. ~ Christian Wiman

Celebrate my heart, at ease or on fire, in my usual featherbrained way.

Horace, Roman Poet
Ode I-6, 23 BCE ~ Vivian Swift

Some People

Some people flee some other people.
In some country under a sun
and some clouds.

They abandon something close to all they've got,
sown fields, some chickens, dogs,
mirrors in which fire now preens.

Their shoulders bear pitchers and bundles.
The emptier they get, the heavier they grow.

What happens quietly: someone's dropping from exhaustion.
What happens loudly: someone's bread is ripped away,
someone tries to shake a limp child back to life.

Always another wrong road ahead of them,
always another wrong bridge
across an oddly reddish river.
Around them, some gunshots, now nearer, now farther away,
above them a plane seems to circle.

Some invisibility would come in handy,
some grayish stoniness,
or, better yet, some nonexistence
for a shorter or a longer while.

Something else will happen, only where and what.
Someone will come at them, only when and who,
in how many shapes, with what intentions.
If he has a choice,
maybe he won't be the enemy
and will leave them to some sort of life. ~ Wisława Szymborska

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems. ~ Carol Ann Duffy

Poetry is the search for a tangible reality. ~ Marty Rubin

I don't want your babies, Felix. I can assure you I'm not sitting up here like some tragic fallen woman every night dreaming of having your babies." She began tracing a figure of eight with her fingernail along his stomach. The movement looked idle but the nail pressed in hard. "You realize of course that if it were the other way round there would be a law, there would be an actual law: John versus Jen in the high court. And John would put it to Jen that she did wilfully fuck him for five years, before dumping him without warning in the twilight of his procreative window, and taking up with young Jack-the-lad, only twenty-four years old and with a cock as long as my arm. The court rules in favor of John. Every time. Jen must pay damages. Huge sums. Plus six months in jail. No - nine. Poetic justice. ~ Zadie Smith

It was never the way she looked
always the way she was
I would have fallen in love with her
with my eyes closed. ~ Atticus Poetry

'We're not ... we haven't been writing poetry and sprinkling rose petals and tripping hand in hand under rainbows, Kay.'
'Just because you have Y chromosomes doesn't mean you can't tell each other how you feel, Dylan. Your penises won't fall off if you do.' ~ Kim Fielding

Truth is we are all tragedies waiting to happen; we just have to remember to have the rescue crew nearby when it strikes. ~ S. Elle Cameron

Francesca was feeling good feelings, old feelings, poetry and music feelings. ~ Robert James Waller

ALEXEY Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that this "landowner"- for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate- was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovitch, for instance, began with next to nothing; his estate was of the smallest; he ran to dine at other men's tables, and fastened on them as a toady, yet at his death it appeared that he had a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash. At the same time, he was all his life one of the most senseless, fantastical fellows in the whole district. I repeat, it was not stupidity- the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough- but just senselessness, and a peculiar national form of it. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

...[A] poor priest, Chandi Das, was shocking Bengal by composing Dantean songs to a peasant Beatrice, ideal­izing her with romantic passion, exalting her as a symbol of divinity, and making his love an allegory of his desire for absorption in God; at the same time he inaugurated the use of Bengali as a literary language. "I have taken refuge at your feet, my beloved. When I do not see you my mind has no rest .... I cannot forget your grace and your charm, - and yet there is no desire in my heart." Excommunicated by his fellow Brahmans on the ground that he was scandalizing the public, he agreed to renounce his love, Rami, in a public ceremony of recantation; but when, in the course of this ritual, he saw Rami in the crowd, he withdrew his recanta­tion, and going up to her, bowed before her with hands joined in adora-
tion. ~ Will Durant

When you touch me there, honey, makes my blood perspire, you got my body flaming like a California fire. Pulsing, pounding, pushing no longer in control, heatwave in my brain, smolder in my soul. ~ Alice Cooper

Prologue
Flying 1

The almond tree knows
before all the other trees

The almond tree knows
that Spring is coming
before all the other trees

The almond tree knows
that Spring is coming
so well
it blossoms
in the winter ~ Alexandra Psaropoulou

She asks me silly questions.
Like how much do I love her?
I smile and look at the sky for how do I tell her that it is she who gives me my existence... ~ Avijeet Das

During the night a fine, delicate summer rain had washed the plains, leaving the morning sky crisp and clean. The sun shone warm - soon to bake the earth dry. It cast a purple haze across the plain - like a great, dark topaz. In the trees the birds sang, while the squirrels jumped from branch to branch in seeming good will, belying the expected tension of the coming days. ~ Cate Campbell Beatty

I've always been told that
I was born chasing sunsets, but
sometimes I wonder if I'm really
just trying to find a way
to be in two places at once. ~ Wilder Poetry

Poetry is more valuable than cricket, but Bradman would be a fool if he sacrificed his cricket in order to write second-rate minor poetry (and I suppose that it is unlikely that he could do better). ~ G.H. Hardy

Isn't it tragic that sometimes it takes grief to understand what we have held so dear? ~ Priscille Sibley

How tragic it will be if we don't each come to grips with our own personal potential and learn the role the Lord has in mind for us. How sad if we waste one more day with a lack of commitment and not meet the measure of our creation. ~ Glenn L. Pace

The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose. ~ Thomas Gray

Shakespeare has been praised in English more than anything mortal except poetry itself. Fame exhausts thought in his eulogy. ~ George Edward Woodberry

Poetry is language in orbit. ~ Seamus Heaney

For the last 15 years that I have been performing, all I ever wanted to do was transcend poetry to the world. See, it wasn't enough for me to write a book. It wasn't enough for me to join a slam competition, and while those things hold weight, it wasn't the driving force that pushes the pen to the pad. ~ Lemon Andersen

They were inventing their own type of relationship, one that wasn't officially recognized by history or immortalized in poetry or song, but which felt truer and less constraining. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Your fate is never determined when your massive imagination is. ~ Curtis Tyrone Jones

I eat the hearts of girls and puke slugs and snails. ~ Raegan Butcher

It was the cruelest of destiny's tricks, the death of a young person. ~ Danielle Steel

you sat breeding
multiple & varied as a ghost ~ Will Alexander

Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you. ~ Ellen Bass

There's gold, and it's haunting and haunting;
It's luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,
It's the forests where silence has lease;
It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It's the stillness that fills me with peace. ~ Robert W. Service

love is myself in the mirror.
i will see love every time. ~ AVA.

Around the time of the Terran Caesar Augustus, a Martian artist had been composing a work of art. It could have been called a poem, a musical opus, or a philosophical treatise; it was a series of emotions arranged in tragic, logical necessity. Since it could be experienced by a human only in the sense in which a man blind from birth might have a sunset explained to him, it does not matter which category it be assigned. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

The three ingredients of poetry: the mystery of the universe, spiritual curiosity, the energy of language. ~ Mary Oliver

She could feel magic in the quiet spring day, like a sorcerer's far-off voice, and lines of poetry floated over her mind as if they were strands of spider-web. ~ Stella Gibbons

you giver of light.
you lover of love.

you beautiful
beautiful
human being
you. ~ AVA.