Tragedy Quotes

What is happening to me today, romantics would call a melodrama, and cynics — the tragedy.

You’ll need to suffer to make any real art.

We love drama. We love conflict. We need a devil or we’ll create one. None of that is bad. It’s just the way human beings operate. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

I fancy that the true explanation is this. It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.