#tragedy

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. The affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabiness of the subject matter. This is why we love "Madame Bovary" and cry for Emma, why we greedily read "Lolita" as our heart breaks for its small, vulgar, poetic and defiant orphaned heroine. ↗

— Azar Nafisi

#lolita #reading #reading-thinking #tehran #tragedylolita-in-tehran

Misunderstanding and distrust—the predominant elements of a novel. Without them, everyone lives happily from beginning. ↗

— Carmen DeSousa

#happy-ever-after #novel #romance #tragedy #romance-novels

Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it. ↗

— Jean Anouilh

#foul #hope #part #reason #restful

Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy. ↗

— Havelock Ellis

#different #every #every man #fellows #genius

Divorce is the one human tragedy that reduces everything to cash. ↗

— Rita Mae Brown

#divorce #everything #human #reduces #tragedy

This familiarity with a respected physician and my appreciation of his work, or the tragedy I experienced with the long, tormented agony and death of my mother might have influenced me in wanting to study medicine. It was not the case. ↗

— Albert Claude

#appreciation #case #death #experienced #familiarity

I like to take these unusual characters and then make them as normal as possible, because we all know that the tragedy and the abnormal always hides itself behind the normal. ↗

— Isabelle Huppert

#always #because #behind #characters #hides

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. ↗

— Hypatia

#after #believes #child #fables #fantasies

My soule, poore soule thou talkes of things/ Thou knowest not what, my soule hath sliver wings,/ That mounts me up unto the highest heavens. ↗

— Thomas Kyd

#grief #tragedy #beauty

LARRY--(with increasing bitter intensity, more as if he were fighting with himself than with Hickey) I'm afraid to live, am I?--and even more afraid to die! So I sit here, with my pride drowned on the bottom of a bottle, keeping drunk so I won't see myself shaking in my britches with fright, or hear myself whining and praying: Beloved Christ, let me live a little longer at any price! If it's only for a few days more, or a few hours even, have mercy, Almighty God, and let me still clutch greedily to my yellow heart this sweet treasure, this jewel beyond price, the dirty, stinking bit of withered old flesh which is my beautiful little life! (He laughs with a sneering, vindictive self-loathing, staring inward at himself with contempt and hatred. Then abruptly he makes Hickey again the antagonist.) You think you'll make me admit that to myself? ↗

— Eugene O'Neill

#reality-check #tragedy #beauty