Quotes about Tragedy

We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear. We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott Joplin's music lives! We care because we know this: the life we save is our own.

I thought black people superior people. Not simply superior to white people, because even without thinking about it much, I assumed almost everyone was superior to them; but to everyone. Only white people, after all, would blow up a Sunday school class and grin for television over their victory, i.e. , the death of four small black girls.

To turn away from the great questions and dilemmas of life is a tragedy, for the quest for meaning and truth makes life worth living.

Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.

There was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.

Drunk driving is a killer disease.

Resentment and anger eat away at love as quickly as rust is corroding that metal lawn chair out there in the backyard. One of life's great tragedies is watching a relationship unravel over something that could've been resolved in one intelligent, adult conversation.

Let God leave us! Let us grow up. Let us walk forward on our own. Because we need the silence of the holy: we need the sacred and equally we need its maddening silence. And in the curious privacy and relief of that silence we can go out into the chaos and commit a thousand acts of minor and gleeful splendor all our own. If it's our tragedy to be left by God, then let it also be our luck.

To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.

Matt, I saw a man with his face blown off and no mouth to scream with, and yet he screamed and could not die. I saw two brothers, and one was in blue and one was in grey, and I will not tell you which one took his saber and ran it through the other. Oh God, it was brother against brother, Cain and Abel all over again. And I was turned into Cain. What would God have to do with a nation where brothers can turn against each other with such brutality?

God doesn't plan the horrors. They happen. But God can come into them.

In the early church their first love was forsaken after a time, and they placed their confidence in all the activities of service. And they were told in no uncertain terms, "You have forsaken your first love" (Revelation 2:4). And this is the tragedy: We keep ourselves busy with the things of the Lord and not with the Lord of the things.