Personal Tragedy Quotes

It is not death or dying that is tragic, but rather to have existed without fully participating in life- that is the deepest personal tragedy.

“Do you take pride in your hurt?” Samuel asked. “Does it make you seem large and tragic?” “I don't know.” “Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”

My hope and my intention was that people would experience the tragedy of what Chernobyl was in every regard: a scientific tragedy, a political tragedy, an emotional and personal tragedy, all of that.

The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.

When Alex left for Alaska," Franz remembers, "I prayed. I asked God to keep his finger on the shoulder of that one; I told him that boy was special. But he let Alex die. So on December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced the Lord. I withdrew my church membership and became an atheist. I decided I couldn't believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a boy like Alex.

Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? ...Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.

There's some things I can't write about, just terrible personal tragedies.

I lost my girl a couple years back, Aaliyah, in a plane crash. I wasn't expecting that, and also, my mother died, and at the time, my father wasn't in my life; the only person that took care of me was my mom.

Cancer has been a dark thread that has run throughout my life. It's taken my friends, my parents. My beautiful son.

My maternal grandmother was in London during the Blitz. Indeed, the man she was dating before she met my grandfather was killed beside her in a cinema, in 1941, when a bomb came through the roof - a tragedy in which she herself was badly wounded.

Suddenly it was gone. I'd lost more than my voice and my career. I'd lost my best friend.

As I obsess about my ancient problems, I feel more like I'm sinking in quicksand than lighting a torch. I'm creating neither heat nor light, just the icky, perversely pleasurable squish of self-pity between my toes. My only defense is that I'm not the only one down here in the muck - our whole culture is doting on tales of personal tragedy.

In great misfortunes, people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love--if once one has ever fallen in.

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.

You hear about people your whole life, 'So-and-so has cancer,' and you're like, 'Wow, that's too bad,' and then most people tend to go about their day. But when someone tells you that it's your father or it's your family, that doesn't tend to go away.

The abrupt and sudden death of my wife has taken a severe emotional and psychic toll on me. On top of that, some people have stooped so low that they have tried to use my personal tragedy for their personal benefit.

The death of my husband, coming immediately after the general knowledge of the discoveries with which his name is associated, was felt by the public, and especially by the scientific circles, to be a national misfortune.

My mother was killed in a plane crash, so I hate travelling in planes. Death is so unexpected. I would actually rather stay at home and not go anywhere.

There's something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes.

Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete

If I cry, it's about the personal loss of a friend or something like that. But when it comes to politics - no, I don't cry.

As a final example, let's remember Jeremy Glick, whose father died in the World Trade Center. After his name appeared in an ad opposing war in Iraq, Mr. Glick was invited on The Factor .. I'm not going to dress you down anymore.

It is precisely through the onset of old age, through loss or personal tragedy, that the spiritual dimension would traditionally come into people's lives. This is to say, their inner purpose would emerge only as their outer purpose collapsed and the shell of the ego would begin to crack open. The emphasis shifts from doing to Being, and our civilization, which is lost in doing, knows nothing of Being. It asks: being? What do you do with it?

'Say Her Name' was a book I never wanted to write and never expected to write. I wasn't trying to do anything except write a book for Aura - a book that I thought I had to write.