God is the comic shepherd who gets more of a kick out of that one lost sheep once he finds it again than out of the ninety and nine who had the good sense not to get lost in the first place. God is the eccentric host who, when the country-club crowd ...
If you are involved with the intensity of crescendo situations, with the intensity of tragedy, you might begin to see the humor of these situations as well. As in music, when we hear the crescendo building, suddenly if the music stops, we begin to he...
What a tragic realm this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don't know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not understand what it means.
I listened as she talked, thinking that the worse the tragedy, the more people wanted to forget it--and the harder that became. Maybe that's what made it tragic; not losing the person, but losing your peace of mind. The living suffer more than the de...
Life is not easy. We all have problems-even tragedies-to deal with, and luck has nothing to do with it. Bad luck is only the superstitious excuse for those who don't have the wit to deal with the problems of life.
They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing...
The quotation falsely attributed to Stalin, 'One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,' gets the numbers wrong but captures a real fact about human psychology. (p. 220)
It’s alright,” they say, “Of course, there’s beauty there,” but they hold back; you know they have seen or heard of the ugliness and the insularity there. They have experienced the of it. I have learned to keep silent, not to berate them fo...
I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy — why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.
Pattie saw grief. Her eyes focused on a version of her own young self, and so many other children in Vietnam who grew up without parents, some abandoned because of their ethnicity, others because of tragedy. And her arms reached out wide.
The existence of insignificant people has very important consequences in the world. It can be shown to affect the price of bread and the rate of wages, to call forth many evil tempers from the selfish and many heroisms from the sympathetic, and, in o...
In the life of everyone there is a limited number of experiences which are not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die; and in the long years after, they can be called up in detail, and every emotion that was stirred by them can be live...
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.
Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives.
The baby should always be saved in preference to the mother. That is the advice of the Holy Church, you know that. I was only reminding women of their duty. There is no need to make everything so personal, Margaret. You make everything into your own ...
Get up every day and consider the stage you're on. Only you can decide whether it will be a tragedy, a comedy or a drama.
To make a simple change of a typeface can instantly transform text which had the appearance and tone of a joyous announcement to suddenly convey that of a somber tragedy.
Everybody looked at Sully suspiciously. A rumor that he had burned up in the blaze had been circulating, and people had quickly adjusted to the idea of profound human tragedy. They were reluctant to give it up, Sully could tell. He smiled apologetica...
I've come to realize that you can fight a lot of things in life, but you can't help who you love. You can't change who your heart chooses. I'm afraid that very fact will be the greatest tragedy of my life.
In tragedy and despair, when an endless night seems to have fallen, hope can be found in the realization taht the companion of night is not another night, that the companion of night is day, that darkness always gives way to light, and that death rul...
BEL-IMPERIA: Oh let me go; for in my troubled eyes Now may'st thou read that life in passion dies. HORATIO: Oh stay a while, and I will die with thee; So shalt thou yield, and yet have conquered me.
