Tragic Drama Quotes

Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.

I would like to say something deeper, but for me, I saw a production of "Fences" in Rhode Island and a fabulous actress played Rose, but when she first came on the stage she was mad. You could just see it. She was all, "Troy stop!" So by the time you get to the revelation scene, I didn't think she loved him, so there was no loss. I think that the real tragedy and the real drama or the thing that makes you lean in is to see the love, to see the commitment. To see the fact that Rose is invested in this marriage no matter what.

If I were to do a drama again, I would really like to work on a fatal melodrama, like a love that can't be.

The Battle of Waterloo is a work of art with tension and drama with its unceasing change from hope to fear and back again, changewhich suddenly dissolves into a moment of extreme catastrophe, a model tragedy because the fate of Europe was determined within this individual fate.

As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.

True tragedy may be defined as a dramatic work in which the outward failure of the principal personage is compensated for by the dignity and greatness of his character.

The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.

Why is it that man desires to be made sad, beholding doleful and tragical things, which yet himself would by no means suffer?

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.

Athens is the birthplace of modern tragedy. In the Greek tragic plays, the tableau of the characters would become a statue, like the statue of Oedipus reaching up to the Gods with blood spilling out of his eyes. I love the way the Greeks would immortalize experience. Things that all of us feel.

Tragedy has the great moral defect of giving too much importance to life and death.

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

Some people could say, "I'd like something that's super dramatic and miserable and made me cry and made me sad forever" but that's not my taste.

I think that ultimately any effective drama or tragedy tries to put you as much as it can into the protagonist's shoes.

Tales of power and ambition and intrigue and betrayal and desire - when you're telling those in a big way, you automatically want to go to Shakespeare.

The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.

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

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.

Euripides seems to have felt that the dignified perfection of Sophocles could be challenged only by novelty and irresponsibility. The religious conditions of the Dionysian festival kept him within certain bounds. But within the imposed limits Euripides was as profane as he dared to be, making melodrama of the divine realities which his predecessors accepted religiously, using the stage merely as a convenience for popularizing his own eccentric values.

If centralism is ultimately to prevail; if our entire system of free Institutions as established by our common ancestors is to be subverted, and an Empire is to be established in their stead; if that is to be the last scene of the great tragic drama now being enacted: then, be assured, that we of the South will be acquitted, not only in our own consciences, but in the judgment of mankind, of all responsibility for so terrible a catastrophe, and from all guilt of so great a crime against humanity.

One can play comedy, two are required for melodrama, but a tragedy demands three.

I would love to take a crack at 'Long Day's Journey Into Night.'