Tragic Narrative Quotes

The thing should have plot and character, beginning, middle and end. Arouse pity and then have a catharsis. Those were the best principles I was ever taught.

The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes.

Emmitt Till had walked into a cultural narrative in which his role was already tragically written. It was a narrative designed to preserve white supremacy. So it gave power - the right to kill - to any white claiming to defend the honor of white women.

There was a real conflation of hero and victim in the wake of 9/11, in our perverse desire to create a triumphant myth out of pure tragedy.

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

After all, no one is ever taken in by the happy ending, but we are often divinely fuddled by the tragic curtain.

Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock-exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared.

People, whether they know it or not, like their blues singers miserable. They like their blues singers to die afterwards.

God the father, and even more often the devil himself, appears at times in the place of fate in the modern tragedy. Why is it thatthis has not induced any scholar to develop a theory of the diabolical genre?

Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect.

There has never been an American tragedy. There have only been great failures.

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.

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

I think American drama is at its best when it takes the domestic and makes it epic, like a Greek tragedy in the front room.

I always thought the point of life was something richer than that. Something full of great tragedy or comedy, reversal of fortune, ecstasy, that kind of thing. But no, contemporary urban theorists seem satisfied with the merely livable, which always sounds to me like the merely survivable, the not so bad.

This is why people cry at the movies: because everybody’s doomed. No one in a movie can help themselves in any way. Their fate has already staked its claim on them from the moment they appear onscreen.

The essence of a tragedy, or even of a serious play, is the spiritual awakening, or regeneration, of the hero.

We cannot arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world from his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton's way of regarding things, or at Wordsworth's or at Shelley's, by examining almost any one of their important works.

I defy anyone to finish Halldor Laxness's 'Independent People' without wetting the pages with tears.

Almost all serious stories in the world are stories of failure with a death in it. But there is more lost paradise in them than defeat.

I'm afraid you can't create tragedy out of abnormal psychology.

If Shakespeare's great plays are variants of stories, even novels, you can see how each character is telling his story from his perspective; each is vying with the others for dominance, but in the end, in tragedy, most of these voices will die, to be replaced by the yet more vigorous voice of a younger generation.

Susan Straight finds LA's secret heart in Between Heaven and Here and with a sleight of hand only the masters have, she creates an alley, a neighborhood, a history that is as rich and tragic as any Shakespearean tale.

Tragedies such as Nevil Shute's 'On the Beach' and Stanley Kubrick's 'Dr Strangelove' are so powerful because there's an underlying assumption that this did not have to happen. It is empowering.

The idea that the curtain rises on what is often more or less a happy scene, and it will fall just a few hours later, and everyone will be dead or have gone mad... I find that kind of narrative very appealing.