Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes

The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies.

Tragedy is a literary concept.

The subject of a good tragedy must not be realistic.

In Shakespearean tragedy the main source of the convulsion which produces suffering and death is never good: good contributes to this convulsion only from its tragic implication with its opposite in one and the same character.

A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.

The core of literature is the idea of tragedy... You don't really learn much from the good things that happen to you.

Tragedy warms the soul, elevates the heart, can and ought to create heroes. In this sense, perhaps, France owes a part of her great actions to Corneille.

A tragedy need not have blood and death; it's enough that it all be filled with that majestic sadness that is the pleasure of tragedy.

Every time one can write a self-deluded song, you are way ahead of the game, way ahead. Self-delusion is the basis of nearly all the great scenes in all the great plays, from 'Oedipus' to 'Hamlet.'

All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.

I consider tragedy the highest form of art.

Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.

Browning's tragedies are tragedies without villains.

Greek tragedy was pre-Freudian, so every emotion has to be so raw; there are no psychological undertones.

Whenever I'd seen Greek tragedy done with masks and declamations, it brought me out in a rash.

Tragedy is the oldest form of theatre.

When we have emotions of fear and pity toward the hero of a tragedy, we explore aspects of our own vulnerability in a safe and pleasing setting.

I have changed my definition of tragedy. I now think tragedy is not foul deeds done to a person (usually noble in some manner) but rather that tragedy is irresolvable conflict.

Tragedy and comedy are simply questions of value; a little misfit in life makes us laugh; a great one is tragedy and cause for expression of grief.

The English Writers of Tragedy are possessed with a Notion, that when they represent a virtuous or innocent Person in Distress, they ought not to leave him till they have delivered him out of his Troubles, or made him triumph over his Enemies.

Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored.

What then is tragedy? In the Elizabethan period it was assumed that a play ending in death was a tragedy, but in recent years we have come to understand that to live on is sometimes far more tragic than death.

The tragic element of a character is always intriguing I think.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from another side.