Tragicomedy Quotes

“ESTRAGON: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?

VLADIMIR: (impatiently). Yes, yes, we’re magicians. But let us persevere in what we have resolved, before we forget.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex being a great example. Oedipus is drawn into tragedy not because of laziness or stupidity, but because of his courage and honesty. So an inevitable irony results.
...
[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Siqua metu dempto casta est, ea denique casta est; quae, quia non liceat, non facit, illa facit”
― Ovid, Amori

“We know from subsequent leaks that the president was indeed presented with information about the seriousness of the virus and its pandemic potential beginning at least in early January 2020. And yet, as documented by the Washington Post, he repeatedly stated that “it would go away.” On February 10, when there were 12 known cases, he said that he thought the virus would “go away” by April, “with the heat.” On February 25, when there were 53 known cases, he said, “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away.” On February 27, when there were 60 cases, he said, famously, “We have done an incredible job. We’re going to continue. It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” On March 6, when there were 278 cases and 14 deaths, again he said, “It’ll go away.” On March 10, when there were 959 cases and 28 deaths, he said, “We’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.” On March 12, with 1,663 cases and 40 deaths recorded, he said, “It’s going to go away.” On March 30, with 161,807 cases and 2,978 deaths, he was still saying, “It will go away. You know it—you know it is going away, and it will go away. And we’re going to have a great victory.” On April 3, with 275,586 cases and 7,087 deaths, he again said, “It is going to go away.” He continued, repeating himself: “It is going away.… I said it’s going away, and it is going away.” In remarks on June 23, when the United States had 126,060 deaths and roughly 2.5 million cases, he said, “We did so well before the plague, and we’re doing so well after the plague. It’s going away.” Such statements continued as both the cases and the deaths kept rising. Neither the virus nor Trump’s statements went away.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

“Нравственные поговорки бывают удивительно полезны в тех случаях, когда мы от себя мало что можем выдумать себе в оправдание.”
― Alexander Pushkin, Повести Белкина (сборник): Выстрел, Метель, Гробовщик, Станционный смотритель, Барышня-крестьянка

“I told one of the writers that our fields were so nearly vertical that we planted our corn with a shotgun and had to breed a race of mules with legs shorter on one side than the other for plowing. And when he asked how we transported the corn down off the mountain, I said, in a jug. He appeared to believe me, so I was encouraged to go on and tell him that every church in that corner of the state, except our Indian congregation, either conducted services speaking entirely in tongues or else took up serpents as recommended by Jesus. Both the writer and I had taken a few rounds of Scotch at the time. The story appeared as fact in a well-known national periodical, along with the obligatory descriptions of the beauty and ruggedness and unmatched remoteness and mystery of our mountains.”
― Charles Frazier , Thirteen Moons

“Don't want to do a thing, Ran, do we, from now and on till evermore.”
― Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples

“Ich fürchte dass wir diese nicht "griechisch" genug verstehen, ja dass wir schaudern würden, wenn wir sie einmal griechisch verstünden.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Fünf Vorreden zu fünf ungeschriebenen Büchern

“And in a way, you could say that my father's end was my beginning...Or more precisely, that the end of his lie coincided with the beginning of my truth”
― Alison Bechdel

“It is easy for an academic to claim at a round table that we live in a post-ideological universe - the moment he visits the restroom after the heated discussion, he is again deep-knee in ideology.”
― Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan

“Римские авгуры имели более тонкий и гибкий ум, чем современные литераторы: чтоб обманывать других, им не нужно было обманывать себя.”
― Лев Шестов, All Things are Possible

“Музыка - враг судьбы... Лишь начиная с Вагнера, музыка стала подражать судьбе”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music

“..itaque cum legere non possis quantum habueris, satis est habere quantum legas”
― Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium

“..there are men who regret that we cannot hear our Handel exactly as Handel meant us to because, unfortunately, we no longer castrate boy singers”
― Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Jazz Scene

“Она увозила с собой воспоминания, не отягчавшие совести, и колье, выбранное со вкусом и стоившее не очень дорого.”
― Isaac Babel, Одесские рассказы

“Пока оседлые люди будут искать истины, яблоко с дерева познания не будет сорвано.”
― Лев Шестов, All Things are Possible

“И на смену старого credo, quia absurdum явилось новое, вернее, обновлённое и неузнанное credo, ut intelligam”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“..and there's growing up a scientific church, wherein knowledge, and not humility, labour, and not penance and fasting, are considered essentials”
― Heckethorn Charles William, The Secret Societies of all Ages and Countries; a Comprehensive Account of Upwards of one Hundred An

“So how can you say Jazz started in whorehouses when the musicianers didn't have no real need for them?”
― Robert Gottlieb, Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now

“..по любимому всеми апофатическому принципу - через отрицание осмысленности их бытия - у марионеток может сложиться реальная биография”
― Максим Кантор, Хроника стрижки овец

“Her look became frantic. “You don’t understand,” she said. “Maybe it’s different in the wild land you come from, Mr. Bouchard. But here gentlemen are always right. And girls like me are always sluts once they have lost their m-maidenhood. That is what I will be called if anyone knows. Or whore. Please, Mr. Bouchard.” Her hands clawed at the lapels of his coat.

“Sh, ma petite,” he said, drawing her into his arms again, soothing her. “Sacré coeur, sometimes I forget that now I am in a civilized nation where maidens who are raped are sluts and ’ores. Civilization is a wonderful thing, n’est-ce pas?”
― Mary Balogh, Deceived

“From the geyser ventilators
autumn winds are blowing down
on a thousand business women
having baths in Camden Town.

Waste pipes chuckle into runnels,
steam's escaping here and there,
morning trains through Camden cutting
shake the Crescent and the Square.

Early nip of changeful autumn,
dahlias glimpsed through garden doves,
at the back precarious bathrooms
jutting out from upper floors;

and behind their frail partitions
business women lie and soak,
seeing through the draughty skylight
flying clouds and railway smoke.

Rest you there, poor unbeloved ones,
lap your loneliness in heat.
All too soon the tiny breakfast,
trolley-bus and windy street!”
― John Betjeman, Few Late Chrysanthemums

“Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a large world”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“A moment. Did I mention it? Charles, perhaps finding that he was not much of a success with the lower middle classes, developed in middle life a habit of ennobling the friends who did the decent thing by him. One finds his record full of barons and comtes; the grain of salt is recommended.”
― Robin Hyde, Check to your king

“The shabbiness, even embarrassment, of Hazel Scott playing 'concert boogie woogie' before thousands of white middle-class music lovers, who all assumed that this music was Miss Scott's invention, is finally no more hideous than the spectacle of an urban, college-trained Negro musician pretending, perhaps in all sincerity, that he has the same field of emotional reference as his great-grandfather. the Mississippi slave”
― LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America

“A gift is a gift. A genius need`s nothing more.”
― Marius Svenning Tetlimo

“Hidup bukanlah salah satu antara tragedi atau komedi. Hidup adalah tragikomedi.”
― Chandra Bientang, Sang Peramal

“Each woman's story, Edith's especially but Rose's too, is a kind of English story told over and over in fiction and film but rarely in works of history; the tragicomedy of someone who could not perform the ordinariness expected of them.”
― Christopher Hilliard, The Littlehampton Libels: A Miscarriage of Justice and a Mystery about Words in 1920s England

“Варвары не было дома. Клавдия мыла полы в горницах. Передонов вошёл в кухню вымыть руки. На столе увидел он свёрток синей бумаги, и из него высыпались несколько изюминок. Это был фунт изюма, купленый для булки к чаю, - её пекли дома. Передонов принялся есть изюм, как он был, немытый и нечищенный, и съел весь фунт быстро и жадно, стоя у стола, озираясь на дверь, чтобы Клавдия не вошла невзначай. Потом он тщательно свернул толстую синюю обёртку, под сюртуком вынес её в переднюю, и там положил в карман пальто, чтобы на улице выбросить и таким способом уничтожить следы.”
― Федор Сологуб, The Petty Demon: The Russian Symbolist Classic

“Her face, the face of a saint, an intense little Madonna, was lifted fragilely out of the mortal dust of the afternoon.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jacob's Ladder