top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Tragedy quotes
"Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories - cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful."
"Alone with everybody the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul,and the women break vases against the walls and them men drink too much and nobody finds the one but they keep looking crawling in and out of beds.flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh.there's no chance at all:we are all trapped by a singular fate.nobody ever finds the one.the city dumps fill the junkyards fill the mad houses fill the hospitals fill the graveyards fill nothing else fills."
"Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself."
"Malphas surveyed the women's bodies with utter disgust and sorrowuntil he realized Tabitha was still alive. He knelt by her side and cradled her head tenderly. "Tabby... I'm so sorry"Grimacing she opened her eyes as she labored to breathe. She laughed bitterly, exposing a set of bleeding teeth. "there are some things that sorry doesn't fix, Caleb.""Shhh, don't speak. I can--""you failed us," She went limp in his arms. Her eyes went Dull.Wincing, Caleb held her close to his heart and stroked her bloody hair. "No, Tabby. I failed myself.""Most of all, I failed Nick."
"The transience of humanity frames the tragedy of all people. There are no happy conclusions to life, we all die, and until we die, we will experience both happiness and pain. Acceptance of the tragedy of humankind without remorse is a shattering experience; it enables us to relinquish mawkish misconceptions, destructive obsessions, and crippling attachments. Only by accepting the tragedy of life as an integral part of the incandescent beauty of life, will I understand what it means to rejoice in the indelible bloom of life."
"She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, a tiny, bloody angel in the snow, and they were going to destroy her."
"What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it."
Explore more quotes by Joseph Campbell
"People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who's on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it's alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself."
"Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come."
"The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside."
"What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else."
"When you have lived your individual life in your own adventurous way and then look back upon its course, you will find that you have lived a model human life, after all."
"In America we have people from all kinds of backgrounds, all in a cluster, together, and consequently law has become very important in this country. Lawyers and law are what hold us together. There is no ethos."
"Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told."
"Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy."
"You enter the forestat the darkest point,where there is no path.Where there is a way or path,it is someone else's path.You are not on your own path.If you follow someone else's way,you are not going to realizeyour potential."
bottom of page