Tragic Quotes

My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

Life would be tragic if it weren't funny.

Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? ...Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.

You want me to be a tragic backdrop so that you can appear to be illuminated, so that people can say ‘Wow, isn’t he so terribly brave to love a girl who is so obviously sad?’ You think I’ll be the dark sky so you can be the star? I’ll swallow you whole.

You're just worried they'll hire a male instructor and he'll be hotter than you." Jace's eyebrows went up. "Hotter than me?" "It could happen," Clary said, "You know, theoretically." "Theoretically the planet could suddenly crack in half, leaving me on one side and you on the other, forever and tragically parted, but I'm not worried about that either. Some things," Jace said, with his customary crooked smile, "are just too unlikely to dwell upon.

Life, a beauty chased by tragic laughter.

Look...at...me..." he whispered. The green eyes found the black, but after a second, something in the depths of the dark pair seemed to vanish, leaving them fixed, blank, and empty. The hand holding Harry thudded to the floor, and Snape moved no more.

We are unusual and tragic and alive.

Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.

We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.

Don't laugh at the spinsters, dear girls, for often very tender, tragic romances are hidden away in the hearts that beat so quietly under the sober gowns, and many silent sacrifices of youth, health, ambition, love itself, make the faded faces beautiful in God's sight. Even the sad, sour sisters should be kindly dealt with, because they have missed the sweetest part of life, if for no other reason.

Nothing is more tragic than loving someone to the depths of your soul and knowing they cannot and will not ever love you back.

How long did you resist?” asks Uriel. “Did you push her away? Did you tell her she meant no more to you than any other animal? Oh, Raffe, did she die thinking you didn't care about her? How tragic. That must just tear you to pieces.” Raffe looks up with murder in his eyes. “Don't. Talk. About. Her.

I can't go on, I'll go on.

I'm for the individual as opposed to the corporation. The way it is the individual is the underdog, and with all the things a corporation has going for them the individual comes out banged on her head. The artist is nothing. It's really tragic.

There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted.

If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.

And there I am, blushing and confused, made beautiful by Cinna’s hands, desirable by Peeta’s confession, tragic by circumstance, and by all accounts, unforgettable.

Every story is part of a whole, entire life, you know? Happy and sad and tragic and whatever, but an entire life. And books let you know them.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.

We live in a dark and romantic and quite tragic world.

I’m not sad, but the boys who are looking for sad girls always find me. I’m not a girl anymore and I’m not sad anymore. You want me to be a tragic backdrop so that you can appear to be illuminated, so that people can say ‘Wow, isn't he so terribly brave to love a girl who is so obviously sad?’ You think I’ll be the dark sky so you can be the star? I’ll swallow you whole.

The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.

I feel about Photoshop the way some people feel about abortion. It is appalling and a tragic reflection on the moral decay of our society…unless I need it, in which case, everybody be cool.

Carter Kane, 14, died tragically in Paris when he was eaten by his sister’s cat Muffin.

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.

There was more to say, but for once we did not say it. There would be other times for speaking, tonight and tomorrow and all the days after that. He let go of my hand.

You must save yourself," Tairn demands. "I chose you not as my next but as my last, and should you fall, then I will follow.

I came to see you,” Jameson told me. “Every day. The least you could have done was wake up while I was here, tragically backlit, unspeakably handsome, and waiting.

We’ve all got weaknesses. Me, for instance. I’m tragically funny and good-looking.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

That's the nature of being a parent, Sabine has discovered. You'll love your children far more than you ever loved your parents, and -- in the recognition that your own children cannot fathom the depth of your love -- you come to understand the tragic, unrequited love of your own parents.

Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.

All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.

There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detached.

Life can be wildly tragic at times, and I've had my share. But whatever happens to you, you have to keep a slightly comic attitude. In the final analysis, you have got not to forget to laugh.

I swear that woman had a previous career as a death-hunter selling tragic ballads down around the Seven Dials," said Will. "And I do wish she wouldn't sing about poisoning just after we've eaten.

I know that you're selfish, selfish beyond words, and I know that you haven't the nerve of a rabbit, I know you're a liar and a humbug, I know that you're utterly contemptible. And the tragic part is'--her face was on a sudden distraught with pain--'the tragic part is that notwithstanding I love you with all my heart.

The most difficult aspect of moving on is accepting that the other person already did.

Every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need.

But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.

Wes wants to be with Macy. And Macy, whether she'll admit it or not, wants to be with Wes. And yet they're not together, which is not only unjust, but when you think about it, tragical!

There seemed to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.

One of the tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon - instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

Most nights, her body was commerce. She traded vacuous affection for survival. Her wounded soul, bandaged by the deceptive nature of the Zone had served no purpose in aiding her.

My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.

No one tells you it's all about to change, to be taken away. There's no proximity alert, no indication that you're standing on the precipice. And maybe that's what makes tragedy so tragic. Not just what happens, but how it happens: a sucker punch that comes at you out of nowhere, when you're least expecting it. No time to flinch or brace.

But it does make me sad that we've forgotten our names. Out of everything, this seems to me the most tragic. I miss my own and I mourn for everyone else's, because I'd like to love them, but I don't know who they are.

Look. (Grown-ups skip this paragraph) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending. I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming.

I don't know what I was expecting a vampire's room to look like. Maybe lots of black, a bunch of books by Camus... oh, and a sensitive portrait of the only human the vamp ever loved, who had no doubt died of something beautiful and tragic, thus dooming the vamp to an eternity of moping and sighing dramatically. What can I say? I read a lot of books.

It starts so young, and I'm angry about that. The garbage we're taught. About love, about what's "romantic." Look at so many of the so-called romantic figures in books and movies. Do we ever stop and think how many of them would cause serious and drastic unhappiness after The End? Why are sick and dangerous personality types so often shown a passionate and tragic and something to be longed for when those are the very ones you should run for your life from? Think about it. Heathcliff. Romeo. Don Juan. Jay Gatsby. Rochester. Mr. Darcy. From the rigid control freak in The Sound of Music to all the bad boys some woman goes running to the airport to catch in the last minute of every romantic comedy. She should let him leave. Your time is so valuable, and look at these guys--depressive and moody and violent and immature and self-centered. And what about the big daddy of them all, Prince Charming? What was his secret life? We dont know anything about him, other then he looks good and comes to the rescue.

Man is born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way.

That's all you can do in this world, no matter how strong the current beats against you, or how heavy your burden, or how tragic your love story. You keep going.

She can't keep writing about what a tragic little hero I am, it'll get boring.

He was still indescribably breathtaking, but it was all the tragic beauty of a sky where every single star was falling. His hair was a storm of broken gold. His eyes were a mess of silver and blue.

Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.

Everyone in your culture knows this. Man was born to turn the world into paradise, but tragically he was born flawed. And so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidty, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness.

It is true that God may have called you to be exactly where you are. But, it is absolutely vital to grasp that he didn’t call you there so you could settle in and live your life in comfort and superficial peace.

... just because [butterflies'] lives were short didn't mean they were tragic... See, they have a beautiful life.

The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die - although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born.

She liked being reminded of butterflies. She remembered being six or seven and crying over the fates of the butterflies in her yard after learning that they lived for only a few days. Her mother had comforted her and told her not to be sad for the butterflies, that just because their lives were short didn't mean they were tragic. Watching them flying in the warm sun among the daisies in their garden, her mother had said to her, see, they have a beautiful life. Alice liked remembering that.

Like most of my stories, it will end tragically.

Kidnapped by a vampire, death by a squid. How tragic.

I wanted to punch him and understand him at the same time.

Why are you putting on lip gloss, my daughter?” Dad asked. “Trip to the library? Trip to the nunnery? I hear the nunneries are nice this time of year” … “Is this true, Kami? Are you going out on a date?” Dad asked tragically. “Wearing that? Wouldn’t you fancy a shapeless cardigan instead? You rock a shapeless cardigan, honey.

Hope. Hope that something beautiful may come from this tragic story. Fear. Fear that it won’t. Forgiveness … forgiveness.

isn’t it such a tragic thing. when you can see it so clearly but the other person doesn’t.

Some of it's magic and some of it's tragic but I had a good life all the way.

Maybe one of the monsters ate him," Daphne whimpered. "That would be awesome," Puck said. Sabrina flashed him an angry look. "Awesome in a terrible, heartbreakingly tragic way," Puck continued.

Never try to understand the students. They hate it. They would much rather be tragically misunderstood, wallow in self-pity, stew in their own —” “That’s enough, Phineas,” said Dumbledore.

Lastly, and I know it sounds like an excuse, but neither you nor I nor anyone can ever really know whether a story is happy or tragic.

He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo. Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic. Nothing is more sublime.

But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse

The unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.

I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

Gordon Edgley's sudden death came as a shock to everyone - not least himself. One moment he was in his study, seven words into the twenty-fifth sentence of the final chapter of his new book, And the Darkness Rained upon Them, and the next he was dead. A tragic loss, his mind echoed numbly as he slipped away.

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

I pictured her tragically; it never once ocurred to me to picture her as the tragedy.

I’m tragically in love with you too.

Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.

Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource - the minds of our children.

I always tell my students that Malcolm X came both to his spirituality and to his consciousness as a thinker when he had solitude to read. Unfortunately, tragically, like so many young black males, that solitude only came in prison.

I lived in pain because I chose to live in pain. Somewhere along the line, I fell in love with the idea of tragedy, the idea that I was destined to live a tragic life. I had this romantic idea about the life of a writer and what he was supposed to suffer. [...:] Somehow I made my own pain a kind of god.

Mass is not proportional to volume. A girl as small as a violet. A girl who moves like a flower petal is pulling me toward her with more force than her mass. Just then, like Newton’s apple, I rolled toward her without stopping until I fell on her, with a thump. With a thump. My heart keeps bouncing between the sky and the ground. It was my first love.

Peeta actually is charming and then utterly winning as the boy in love. And there I am, blushing and confused, made beautiful by Cinna’s hands, desirable by Peeta’s confession, tragic by circumstance, and by all accounts, unforgettable.

With a truly tragic delusion,” Carl Jung noted, “these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing.

Yeah, I had all kinds of tragic reasons for feeling sorry for myself. Being fifteen didn't help. Sometimes I thought that being fifteen was the worst tragedy of all.

I wish it didn’t have to hurt you,” she says. “Do you?” “Of course. Believe me, Cassio. I never wanted to be this tragic.

Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.

The great tragic love story of Percy and me is neither great nor truly a love story, and is tragic only for its single-sidedness. It is also not an epic monolith that has plagued me since boyhood, as might be expected. Rather, it is simply the tale of how two people can be important to each other their whole lives, and then, one morning, quite without meaning to, one of them wakes to find that importance has been magnified into a sudden and intense desire to put his tongue in the other's mouth. A long, slow slide, then a sudden impact.

The most tragic form of loss isn't the loss of security; it's the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different.

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

My heart cracked. Daemon never begged.

Man is the ultimate tragic being, because he has learned enough about the Earth to realise the Earth would be better off without the presence of humankind.

History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset.

DEMON MATH What is JUST in a world you've ripped in two as if there could be a half for me a half for you what is FAIR when there is nothing left to share what is YOURS when your pain is mine to bear this sad math is mine this mad path is mine subtract they say don't cry back to the desk try forget addition multiply and i reply this is why remainders hate division.

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

He was wearing a look that she found odd and compelling - that amusement that didn’t seem to pass beyond the surface of his features, as he found everything in the world both infinitely funny and infinitely tragic all at the same time.

I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to love... There's no pattern to it, except that it happens to all of us, of course. I can't plan for it. I can't predict how it'll end up. Because love is unpredictable and it's frustrating and it's tragic and it's beautiful...

But as she tried to unravel him, he grew increasingly tragic and terrifyingly human

Tragic heroes always moan when the gods take an interest in them, but it's the people the gods ignore who get the really tough deals.

Last, but not least -- in fact, this is most important -- you need a happy ending. However, if you can create tragic situations and jerk a few tears before the happy ending, it will work much better.

Life is a conjurer’s trick that may become a playground for multifarious side-splitting acts; sometimes a showdown for a series of torturous, off the wall questions or often a terrain for tragic miscalculations. ("Wheeling and dealing." )

I've decided that it's possible to love someone for entirely selfless reasons, for all of their flaws and weaknesses, and still not succeed in having them love you back. It's sad, perhaps, but not tragic, unless you dwell forever in the pursuit of their elusive affections.

You go to someone and you think, 'I’ll tell him this.' But why? The impulse is that the telling is going to relieve you. And that’s why you feel awful later—you’ve relieved yourself, and if it truly is tragic and awful, it’s not better, it’s worse—the exhibitionism inherent to a confession has only made the misery worse.

All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.

Akri won't let me eat any of them nasty gods. What's the world coming to when a demon gots to beg for tidbits...not eve a finger sandwich or a single knuckle. Tragic. Terribly tragic.

I think it's really tragic when people get serious about stuff. It's such an absurdity to take anything really seriously ... I make an honest attempt not to take anything seriously: I worked that attitude out about the time I was eighteen, I mean, what does it all mean when you get right down to it, what's the story here? Being alive is so weird.

Pretty fucking tragic twist of fate, but you don’t seem to remember that we first met years ago. An issue, since I remember a little too well. I like no one, absolutely no one, but I liked you from the start. I liked you when I didn’t know you, and now that I do know you it’s only gotten worse. Sometimes, often, always, I think about you before falling asleep. Then I dream of you, and when I wake up my head’s still there, stuck on something funny, beautiful, filthy, intelligent that’s all about you. It’s been going on for a while, longer than you think, longer than you can imagine, and I should have told you, but I have this impression, this certainty that you’re half a second from running away, that I should give you enough reasons to stay. Is there anything I can do for you? I’ll take you grocery shopping and fill your fridge when we’re back home. Buy you a new bike and a case of decent reagent and that sludge you drink. Kill the people who made you cry. Is there something you need? Name it. It’s yours. If I have it, it’s yours.

To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative - to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception - is worse.

Everything. A letter may be coded, and a word may be coded. A theatrical performance may be coded, and a sonnet may be coded, and there are times when it seems the entire world is in code. Some believe that the world can be decoded by performing research in a library. Others believe that the world can be decoded by reading a newspaper. In my case, the only thing that made sense of the world was you, and without you the world will seem as garbled and tragic as a malfunctioning typewrit9.

Right after something tragic happens, you feel like you’ve fallen off a cliff. But after the tragedy starts to sink in, you realize you didn’t fall off a cliff. You’re on an eternal roller coaster that just reached the bottom. Now it’s gonna be up and down and upside down for a long, long time. Maybe even forever.

It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous. Because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in...it's actually kind of tragic because you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is. And there were a couple of years where I really struggled with that.

You forgave me in a dream the other night. The more you told me it was alright, the worse I felt. I know that you were only doing it because you knew I couldnt possibly hurt you more than I already had. I could see what forgiving me was doing to you. I know that you think I'm to stupid to figure it all out. When you forgave me, you knew that it was finally over. The pain would leave me, I would forget you and you would never see me again except in a dream. It is sad that the things that we saw in each other are no longer there. It is a shame that we tore each other apart looking for things that we needed desperately but could never find. It is tragic that we only wanted to give each other but only stole from ourselves and blamed each other for the emptiness in our lives. I see you differently now. I no longer fear you. It took years to see you for what you really are.

The thing I was beginning to figure out about Sam and Grace, the thing about Sam not being able to function without her, was that that sort of love only worked when you were sure both people would always be around for each other. If one half of the equation left, or died, or was slightly less perfect in their love, it became the most tragic, pathetic story invented, laughable in its absurdity. Without Grace, Sam was a joke without a punch line.

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.

I didn't realize there was a ranking." I said. "Sadie frowned. "What do you mean?" "A ranking," I said. "You know, what's crazier than what." "Oh, sure there is," Sadie said. She sat back in her chair. "First you have your generic depressives. They're a dime a dozen and usually pretty boring. Then you've got the bulimics and the anorexics. They're slightly more interesting, although usually they're just girls with nothing better to do. Then you start getting into the good stuff: the arsonists, the schizophrenics, the manic-depressives. You can never quite tell what those will do. And then you've got the junkies. They're completely tragic, because chances are they're just going to go right back on the stuff when they're out of here." "So junkies are at the top of the crazy chain," I said. Sadie shook her head. "Uh-uh," she said. "Suicides are." I looked at her. "Why?" "Anyone can be crazy," she answered. "That's usually just because there's something screwed up in your wiring, you know? But suicide is a whole different thing. I mean, how much do you have to hate yourself to want to just wipe yourself out?

These days, I've been trying to classify my thoughts into two categories: "Things I can change," and "Things I can't." It seems to help me sort through what to really stress about. But there I go again, over-planning and over-organizing my over-thinking! I write songs about my adventures and misadventures, most of which concern love. Love is a tricky business. But if it wasn't, I wouldn't be so enthralled with it. Lately I've come to a wonderful realization that makes me even more fascinated by it: I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to love. No one does! There's no pattern to it, except that it happens to all of us, of course. I can't plan for it. I can't predict how it'll end up. Because love is unpredictable and it's frustrating and it's tragic and it's beautiful. And even though there's no way to feel like I'm an expert at it, it's worth writing songs about -- more than anything else I've ever experienced in my life.

Men's deaths are epic, women's deaths are tragic: is that it? He has misunderstood the very nature of conflict. Epic is countless tragedies, woven together. Heroes don't become heroes without carnage, and carnage has both causes and consequences. And those don't begin and end on a battlefield.

Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.

We are all smiling in the picture, three brothers having a grand old time just playing around in the living room, no agendas, no buried resentments or permanent scars. Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.

Ruins stood for what was lost, and yet there were beautiful-peaceful, historic, intellectual. Not tragic or regrettable. Lena tried to keep hers that way too, and she succeeded to some extent. Why not celebrate what you had rather than spend your time mourning its passing? There could be joy in things that ended.

I found something" Simon said as he walked in. He whipped out an old-fashioned key from his pocket and grinned at me. "It was taped to the back of my dresser drawer. What do you think? Buried treasure? Secret passageway? Locked room where they keep crazy old Aunt Edna?" "It probaly unlocks another dresser," Tori said. "One they threw out fifty years ago." "Its tragic, being born without an imagination. Do they hold telethons for that?

darkness falls upon Humanity and faces become terrible things that wanted more than there was. all our days are marked with unexpected affronts - some disastrous, others less so but the process is wearing and continuous. attrition rules. most give way leaving empty spaces where people should be. and now as we ready to self-destruct there is very little left to kill which makes the tragedy less and more much much more.

I made strength from everything that had happened to me, so that in the end even the final tragedy could not defeat me. And that is what Ultima tried to teach me, that the tragic consequences of life can be overcome by the magical strength that resides in the human heart. --Antonio

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Howl backed into the door to shut it and leaned there in a tragic attitude. "Look at you all!" he said. "Ruin stares me in the face. I slave all day for you. And not one of you, even Calcifer, can spare time to say hello!" Calcifer said, "I never do say hello." "Is something wrong?" asked Sophie. "That's better," Howl said. "Some of you are pretending to notice me at last. Yes, something is wrong.

Friar Hugo, old friend, brace yourself. I am the bearer of tragic news!" Alarm spread across Hugo's pudgy features. "Tell me, Jess. What dreadful thing has happened?" Jess spoke haltingly in a broken voice. "I fear that Cluny has tore up one of your oldest and most venerable dishrags. Alas, Redwall will never see it wipe another plate.

I am fundamentally happy. Everyone has experiences that makes them cynical, jaded or unhappy - you just have to fight those things off. I have totally emotional days when I cry and get insecure. PMS weirded out, doomed and tragic. I mean, I'm definitely not just a lollipop, happy in the wind girl. I'm human just like everyone else, but I think that it would be tragic to be on your deathbed and think, 'I could've I should've.' That gets me out of bed everyday. I can't even last like an hour in bed in the morning. I have to get out there and live.

Theatres are curious places, magician's trick-boxes where the golden memories of dramtic triumphs linger like nostalgic ghosts, and where the unexplainable, the fantastic, the tragic, the comic and the absurd are routine occurences on and off the stage. Murders, mayhem, politcal intrigue, lucrative business, secret assignations, and of course, dinner.

Life is a big fat gigantic stinking mess, that's the beauty of it, too.

The terrible, tragic fallacy of the last hundred years has been to think that all man's troubles are due to his environment, and that to change the man you have nothing to do but change his environment. That is a tragic fallacy. It overlooks the fact that it was in Paradise that man fell.

If only we could have talked to you, the hive-queen said in Ender's words. But since it could not be, we ask only this: that you remember us, not as enemies, but as a tragic sisters, changed into foul shape by fate or God or evolution. If we had kissed, it would have been the miracle to make us human in each other's eyes. Instead we killed each other. But still we welcome you now as guestfriends. Come into our home, daughters of Earth; dwell in our tunnels, harvest our fields; what we cannot do, you are now our hands to do for us. Blossom, trees; ripen, fields; be warm for them, suns; be fertile for them, planets: they are our adopted daughters, and they have come home.

One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying. A persistent schizophrenia leaves so many of us tragically divided against ourselves. On the one hand, we proudly profess certain sublime and noble principles, but on the other hand, we sadly practise the very antithesis of these principles. How often are our lives characterised by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anaemia of deeds! We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practise the very opposite of the democratic creed. We talk passionately about peace, and at the same time we assiduously prepare for war. We make our fervent pleas for the high road of justice, and then we tread unflinchingly the low road of injustice. This strange dichotomy, this agonising gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage.

In a typical college romance novel, he'd be a gorgeous but troubled sex god who'd cure all my deep-seated psych issues with a good hard fuck. I'd smell his misogyny and abusive tendencies from miles off but my brain would turn to hormone soup because abs. That's the formula. Broken girl + bad boy = sexual healing. All you need to fix that tragic past is a six-pack. More problems? Add abs. It's Magic Dick Lit.

Love me, even if it’s a lie. Leave me yet never say goodbye.

To say that nothing is true is to realize that the foundations of society are fragile and that we must be the shepherds of our civilization. To say that everything is permitted is to understand that we are the architects of our actions, and that we must live with their consequences, whether glorious or tragic.

How sad it was, Carmen thought, that you acted awful when you were desperately sad and hurt and wanted to be loved. How tragic then, the way everyone avoided you and tiptoed around you when you really needed them. Carmen knew this vicious predicament as well as anyone in the world. How bitter it felt when you acted badly to everyone and ended up hating yourself the most.

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you're young enough, you don't know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in the sidewalk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your parent was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you.

The beauty of this idea is that my decision to keep Peeta alive at the expense of my own life is itself an act of defiance. A refusal to play the Hunger Games by the Capitol's rules. My private agenda dovetails completely with my public one. And if I really could save Peeta... in terms of a revolution, this would be ideal. Because I will be more valuable dead. They can turn me into some kind of martyr for the cause and paint my face on banners, and it will do more to rally people than anything I could do if I was living. But Peeta would be more valuable alive, and tragic, because he will be able to turn his pain into words that will transform people.

My God", he whispered. What have I done to her? He thought, humbled. The spell was broken, but it wasn't sealed, and her soul was bare to him, the scars of her tragic past and her triumphs over pain and her aching need to find her place. He just wanted to hold her to him and tell her it would be okay, that she had survived and was beautiful.

Masquerades disclose the reality of souls. As long as no one sees who we are, we can tell the most intimate details of our life. I sometimes muse over this sketch of a story about a man afflicted by one of those personal tragedies born of extreme shyness who one day, while wearing a mask I don’t know where, told another mask all the most personal, most secret, most unthinkable things that could be told about his tragic and serene life. And since no outward detail would give him away, he having disguised even his voice, and since he didn’t take careful note of whoever had listened to him, he could enjoy the ample sensation of knowing that somewhere in the world there was someone who knew him as not even his closest and finest friend did. When he walked down the street he would ask himself if this person, or that one, or that person over there might not be the one to whom he’d once, wearing a mask, told his most private life. Thus would be born in him a new interest in each person, since each person might be his only, unknown confidant.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. I'm not sure who the first person was who said that. Probably Shakespeare. Or maybe Sting. But at the moment, it's the sentence that best explains my tragic flaw, my inability to change. I don't think I'm alone in this. The more I get to know other people, the more I realize it's kind of everyone's flaw. Staying exactly the same for as long as possible, standing perfectly still... It feels safer somehow. And if you are suffering, at least the pain is familiar. Because if you took that leap of faith, went outside the box, did something unexpected... Who knows what other pain might be out there, waiting for you. Chances are it could be even worse. So you maintain the status quo. Choose the road already traveled and it doesn't seem that bad. Not as far as flaws go. You're not a drug addict. You're not killing anyone... Except maybe yourself a little. When we finally do change, I don't think it happens like an earthquake or an explosion, where all of a sudden we're like this different person. I think it's smaller than that. The kind of thing most people wouldn't even notice unless they looked at us really close. Which, thank God, they never do. But you notice it. Inside you that change feels like a world of difference. And you hope this is it. This is the person you get to be forever... that you'll never have to change again.

I think that perhaps everyone has a moment that splits their life in two. When you look back on your own time line there's a sharp spike somewhere along the way, some event that changed you, changed your life more than the others. A moment that creates a before and an after. Maybe it's when you meet your love or you figure out your life's passion or you have your first child. Maybe it's something wonderful. Maybe it's something tragic. But when it happens it tints your memories, shifts your perspective on your own life and it suddenly seems as if everyone you've been through falls under the label of pre or post.

Do you take pride in your hurt?' Samuel asked. 'Does it make you seem large and tragic? . . . Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience . . . there's all that fallow land, and here beside me is all that fallow man. It seems a waste. And I have a bad feeling about waste because I could never afford it. Is it a good feeling to let your life lie fallow?

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course—for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.

We don't look at the stars in the universe and say how tragic they are, how bruised they are, even though that is what they are. We look at them and speak of the beauty they contain. The inspiration they give us. Even though stars are the scars of the universe we don't see them as these broken pieces of gaseous matter, we see them as these majestic astrological blessings that give hope to billions. What if you saw yourself in that same light, or better yet what if you saw others in a similar way.

Nagumo was suddenly on his own. At this crucial time, the cost of his failure to learn the complicated factors that played into carrier operations suddenly exploded. Now, when every minute counted, it was too late to learn the complexities involved in loading different munitions on different types of planes on the hangar deck, too late to learn how the planes were organized and spotted on the flight decks, too late to learn the flight capabilities of his different types of planes, and far too late to know how to integrate all those factors into a fast-moving and efficient operation with the planes and ordnance available at that moment. Commander Genda, his brilliant operations officer, couldn’t make the decisions for him now. It was all up to Nagumo. At 0730 on June 4, 1942, years of shipbuilding, training, and strategic planning had all come to this moment. Teams of highly trained pilots, flight deck personnel, mechanics, and hundreds of other sailors were ready and awaiting his command. The entire course of the battle, of the Combined Fleet, and even perhaps of Japan were going to bear the results of his decisions, then and there.

During the Fireside Chats, half the country tuned in on their radios, and it was said that on hot summer nights when people had their windows open, one could walk through the residential downtown of a large city and hardly miss a word.

I like Texas and Texans. In Texas, everything is bigger. When Texans win, they win big. And when they lose, it's spectacular. If you really want to learn the attitude of how to handle risk, losing and failure, go to San Antonio and visit the Alamo. The Alamo is a great story of brave people who chose to fight, knowing there was no hope of success against overwhelming odds. They chose to die instead of surrendering. It's an inspiring story worthy of study; nonetheless, it's still a tragic military defeat. They got their butts kicked. A failure if you will. They lost. So how do Texans handle failure? They still shout, "Remember the Alamo!" That's why I like Texans so much. They took a great failure and turned it into a tourist destination that makes them millions. Texans don't bury their failures. They get inspired by them. They take their failures and turn them into rallying cries. Failure inspires Texans to become winners. But that formula is not just the formula for Texans. It is formula for all winners.

I read old novels. The reason is simple: I prefer proper endings. Marriages and deaths, noble sacrifices and miraculous restorations, tragic separations and unhoped-for reunions, great falls and dreams fulfilled; these, in my view, constitute an ending worth the wait. They should come after adventures, perils, dangers and dilemmas, and wind everything up nice and neatly. Endings like this are to be found more commonly in old novels than new ones, so I read old novels.

…This… ’stuff’? I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? …And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.

..., It'd taken her several seconds to react to the sight of them together. She'd been almost hypnotized by the scene as Lothaire drank. Chase's masculine face had been tense, his gray eyes focused on the ground. Lothaire's face had been starkly beautiful, his pale blond hair brushing Chase's shoulder. Light and dark. One terrible, one tragic. And Lothaire had been... hard. "Oh, gods!" She cried as she ran back along the trail. Hot poker for my eyes! Hot poker!

The Great and Tragic Love of Jonathan Shadowhunter and David the Silent, by Clary Fray, Aged 17. SIMON IT WAS BY SIMON NOT ME (...) Jonathan Shadowhunter: Oh, David, I would trust you with my life! David: Oh, Jonathan, I would sacrifice my own life for your holy mission! (He almost does) Jonathan: (weeping) David, you must return to me! I need you! I cannot do this thing without you! David: Lo, I return! Jonathan: Zounds! I feel a great stirring in my pantaloons! David: What doth thy pantalo SIMON I WILL KILL YOU

TF-16 returned to Pearl Harbor on May 26 in good order, with one huge exception: Admiral Halsey, the sixty-year-old commander, arrived back completely exhausted and ill. After six months of intense underway operations, culminating in the fruitless 7000-mile mission across the Pacific to the Coral Sea and back, Halsey had lost twenty pounds and had contracted a serious case of dermatitis. Nimitz took one look at him and sent him straight to the Pearl Harbor hospital. The Navy’s most experienced and highly regarded carrier force commander would sit out the Battle of Midway. The ultimate sea warrior, Halsey would watch from his hospital window as the two task forces departed Pearl Harbor for Midway.

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

Do you know where Jean de Tournet is?” Jason asked. “He is dead, Uncle,” Charlotte said flatly. “How do you know?” “I killed him in 1943. He was doing business with the Nazis. He tried to rape me” – she stopped and shivered – “but I killed him before he could.” Jason and Sophie both looked at Charlotte with horror. This was the first time Jason had showed any genuine emotion throughout the evening. It was fear.

Sometimes I wanted to dance and laugh with my friends until midnight, and sometimes I wanted to screen all calls and hide away with a tragic novel and a bag of candy. Sometimes I spend an hour trying to pretty myself up, and sometimes I could barely be bothered to comb the knots out of my hair before I left the house. Sometimes I wanted to know what it felt like to tell a boy all my secrets. Other times, that seemed as impossible as waking up one morning to find myself fluent in a foreign language. Sometimes I felt better alone that I did with people. And sometimes that just felt lonely.

There are stories that are true, in which each individual's tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it to deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others' pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.

you said. if it is meant to be. fate will bring us back together. for a second i wonder if you are really that naive. if you really believe fate works like that. as if it lives in the sky staring down at us. as if it has five fingers and spends its time placing us like pieces of chess. as if it is not the choices we make. who taught you that. tell me. who convinced you. you’ve been given a heart and a mind that isn’t yours to use. that your actions do not define what will become of you. i want to scream and shout it’s us you fool. we’re the only ones that can bring us back together. but instead i sit quietly. smiling softly through quivering lips thinking. isn’t it such a tragic thing. when you can see it so clearly but the other person doesn’t.

Aren't they supposed to be hiring someone else to train me, ANYWAY?" "Yes," he said, getting up and pulling her to her feet with him. "and I'm worried that if you get into the habit of making out with your instructors, you'll wind up making out with him, too." "Don't be sexist. They could find me a female instructor." "In that case you have my permission to make out with her, as long as I can watch." "Nice." Clary grinned, bending down to fold up the blanket they'd brought to sit on. "You're just worried they'll hire a male instructor and he'll be hotter than you." Jace's eyebrows went up. "Hotter than ME?" "It could happen," Clary said. "You know, theoretically." "Theoretically the planet can crack in half, leaving me on one side and you on the other side, forever and tragically parted, but I'm not worried about that, either. Some things," Jace said, with his customary crooked smile, "are just too unlikely to dwell upon.

You mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?" "That is about the size of it," said the Sergeant. I felt so sad and so entirely disappointed that tears came into my eyes and a lump of incommunicable poignancy swelled tragically in my throat. I began to feel intensely every fragment of my equal humanity. The life that was bubbling at the end of my fingers was real and nearly painful in intensity and so was the beauty of my warm face and the loose humanity of my limbs and the racy health of my red rich blood. To leave it all without good reason and to smash the little empire into small fragments was a thing too pitiful even to refuse to think about.

The Greatest Generation? They tell me I am a member of the greatest generation. That's because I saw combat duty as a bombardier in World War 11. But I refuse to celebrate "the greatest generation" because in so doing we are celebrating courage and sacrifice in the cause of war. And we are miseducating the young to believe that military heroism is the noblest form of heroism, when it should be remembered only as the tragic accompaniment of horrendous policies driven by power and profit. The current infatuation with World War 11 prepares us--innocently on the part of some, deliberately on the part of others--for more war, more military adventures, more attempts to emulate the military heroes of the past.

Back when I was five, I thought my mom was being mean to me, so I decided to run away. Carried my slingshot with me because I was a big strong man, you see. Could take care of myself. I believe I also took a flashlight and a package of Oreos." Despite my embarrassement, I couldn't help smiling. "I think you packed better than I did." I swaggered out of the house where we were staying and took myself all the way to...the far corner of the backyard. There I made my stand. Stayed out there all day, until it started to reain. I hadn't thought about taking an umbrella." The best laid plans." I sighed. I know. It's tragic. I came back in, all wet and my stomach aching from eating about twenty Oreo, and my mom--who is a smart lady even is she drives me nuts--well, she acted like nothing happened." Lucas shrugged.

Before the first streaks of light at dawn on December 7, 275 miles north of Oahu, the six (Japanese) carriers of the Striking Force turned into the southeast wind. Pounding into heavy swells at high speed, the carriers pitched severely with thunderous impact. The wind, surging seas, and roar of warming aircraft engines made communications possible only by hand signals and handheld signal lamps. Salt spray reached the high flight decks, and Commander Fuchida, the group leader, was very concerned about the conditions for launching planes. If this had been a training exercise the launch might have been delayed until conditions improved. However, this was not an exercise, and there would be no delay.

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly — but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree.

He fills me with horror and I do not hate him. How can I hate him, Raoul? Think of Erik at my feet, in the house on the lake, underground. He accuses himself, he curses himself, he implores my forgiveness!...He confesses his cheat. He loves me! He lays at my feet an immense and tragic love. ... He has carried me off for love!...He has imprisoned me with him, underground, for love!...But he respects me: he crawls, he moans, he weeps!...And, when I stood up, Raoul, and told him that I could only despise him if he did not, then and there, give me my liberty...he offered it...he offered to show me the mysterious road...Only...only he rose too...and I was made to remember that, though he was not an angel, nor a ghost, nor a genius, he remained the voice...for he sang. And I listened ... and stayed!...That night, we did not exchange another word. He sang me to sleep.

BETRAYAL No failure in Life, whether of love or money, is ever really that simple; it usually involves a type of a shadowy betrayal, buried in a secret, mass grave of shared hopes and dreams. That universal mass grave exists in a private cemetery that most... both those suffering from the loss, but especially those committing the betrayal, refuse to acknowledge its existence. When you realize you've been deeply betrayed, fear really hits you. That's what you feel first. And then it's anger and frustration. Then disspointment and disilussionment. Part of the problem is how little we understand about the ultimate effects and consequences of betrayal on our hearts and spirits; and on trust and respect for our fellow brothers and sisters. In writing, there are only really a few good stories to tell, and in the end, and betrayal and the failure of love is one of the most powerful stories to tell. Tragedy in life normally comes with betrayal and compromise- by trading in our integrity and failing to treat life and others in our life, with respect and dignity. That's really where the truest and the most tragic failures comes from... they come making the choice to betray another soul, and in turn, giving up a peice of your own.

Roosevelt was a genius at mass communications, and his speechwriters deferred to his reviews of their drafts, not so much because he was the president, but because when a text required the perfect word, the exquisite or incisive phrase, or exactly the right tone, he was the best. And when it came to delivery, he had no peer.

I heard the universe as an oratorio sung by a master choir of stars, accompanied by the orchestra of the planets and the percussion of satellites and moons. The aria they performed was a song to break the heart, full of tragic dissonance and deferred hope, and yet somewhere beneath it all was a piercing refrain of glory, glory, glory. And I sensed that not only the grand movements of the cosmos, but everything that had happened in my life, was a part of that song. Even the hurts that seemed most senseless, the mistakes I would have done anything to erase--nothing could make those things good, but good could still come out of them all the same, and in the end the oratorio would be no less beautiful for it.

In 1941, as the United States faced the threat of another horrific war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was leading the nation from a wheelchair. Struck down by polio at age thirty-nine, he rehabilitated and marshaled himself, despite severe pain, to press on with his career in politics. Eleven years later, delivering his message of confidence and optimism, he was elected President of the United States. 

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale." George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences. To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot . . . PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose! . . . So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation. They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reasons that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass! There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command. ...I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me." And the artist either says, "My soul doth magnify the Lord," and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary. As for Mary, she was little more than a child when the angel came to her; she had not lost her child's creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world. We lose our ability to see angels as we grow older, and that is a tragic loss.

As night fell, Yamamoto, aboard the huge battleship Yamato, steamed eastward at full speed into the night. Far ahead the destroyers went to flank speed to search for the US carriers. Lookouts, with the best night-vision binoculars in the world, swept the night horizon where the very dark sky meets the black ocean. The faintest shape, the tiniest pinprick of light, would show there was something out there, like the superstructure of a ship over the horizon. There was nothing.

If I were to be made a knight," said the Wart, staring dreamily into the fire, "I should insist on doing my vigil by myself, as Hob does with his hawks, and I should pray to God to let me encounter all the evil in the world in my own person, so that if I conquered there would be none left, and, if I were defeated, I would be the one to suffer for it." "That would be extremely presumptuous of you," said Merlyn, "and you would be conquered, and you would suffer for it." "I shouldn't mind." "Wouldn't you? Wait till it happens and see." "Why do people not think, when they are grown up, as I do when I am young?" "Oh dear," said Merlyn. '"You are making me feel confused. Suppose you wait till you are grown up and know the reason?" "I don't think that is an answer at all," replied the Wart, justly. Merlyn wrung his hands. "Well, anyway," he said, "suppose they did not let you stand against all the evil in the world?" "I could ask," said the Wart. "You could ask," repeated Merlyn. He thrust the end of his beard into his mouth, stared tragically into the fire, and began to munch it fiercely.

But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then, one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of things on earth? – Man governs it himself, – Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this admittedly none-too-clear question. – Pardon me, – the stranger responded gently, – but in order to govern, one needs, after all, to have a precise plan for a certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time. Allow me to ask you, then, how can man govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period, well, say, a thousand years , but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow? And in fact, – here the stranger turned to Berlioz, – imagine that you, for instance, start governing, giving orders to others and yourself, generally, so to speak, acquire a taste for it, and suddenly you get ...hem ... hem ... lung cancer ... – here the foreigner smiled sweetly, and if the thought of lung cancer gave him pleasure — yes, cancer — narrowing his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word —and so your governing is over! You are no longer interested in anyone’s fate but your own. Your family starts lying to you. Feeling that something is wrong, you rush to learned doctors, then to quacks, and sometimes to fortune-tellers as well. Like the first, so the second and third are completely senseless, as you understand. And it all ends tragically: a man who still recently thought he was governing something, suddenly winds up lying motionless in a wooden box, and the people around him, seeing that the man lying there is no longer good for anything, burn him in an oven. And sometimes it’s worse still: the man has just decided to go to Kislovodsk – here the foreigner squinted at Berlioz – a trifling matter, it seems, but even this he cannot accomplish, because suddenly, no one knows why, he slips and falls under a tram-car! Are you going to say it was he who governed himself that way? Would it not be more correct to think that he was governed by someone else entirely?

Back in Washington, alone in the late afternoon of December 7, a chastened Franklin Roosevelt considered the situation.  He may have wondered how things had gone so terribly wrong.  But what might have been was now hindsight—the United States was at war and was in it to win. He spoke quietly to his secretary, Grace Tully. “Sit down, Grace. I’m going before Congress tomorrow. I’d like to dictate my message. It will be short.” 

The contrast with the scans of the eighteen chronic PTSD patients with severe early-life trauma was startling. There was almost no activation of any of the self-sensing areas of the brain: The MPFC, the anterior cingulate, the parietal cortex, and the insula did not light up at all; the only area that showed a slight activation was the posterior cingulate, which is responsible for basic orientation in space. There could be only one explanation for such results: In response to the trauma itself, and in coping with the dread that persisted long afterward, these patients had learned to shut down the brain areas that transmit the visceral feelings and emotions that accompany and define terror. Yet in everyday life, those same brain areas are responsible for registering the entire range of emotions and sensations that form the foundation of our self-awareness, our sense of who we are. What we witnessed here was a tragic adaptation: In an effort to shut off terrifying sensations, they also deadened their capacity to feel fully alive.

Yamamoto was considered, both in Japan and the United States, as intelligent, capable, aggressive, and dangerous. Motivated by his skill as a poker player and casino gambler, he was continually calculating odds on an endless variety of options. He played bridge and chess better than most good players. Like most powerful leaders he was articulate and persuasive, and once in a position of power he pushed his agenda relentlessly. Whether he would push his odds successfully in the Pacific remained to be seen.

I should like to make life beautiful--I mean everybody's life. And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world, pains one. It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from it." I call that the fanaticism of sympathy," said Will, impetuously. "You might say the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement. If you carried it out you ought to be miserable in your own goodness, and turn evil that you might have no advantage over others. The best piety is to enjoy--when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth's character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates. It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight--in art or in anything else. Would you turn all the youth of the world into a tragic chorus, wailing and moralising over misery? I suspect that you have some false belief in the virtues of misery, and want to make your life a martyrdom.

Nothing can fill you up,” she stated. “Nope,” he agreed again. “You won’t let it.” “Barrel’s got a hole in the bottom, buddy, everything leaks out no matter how much you pour in.” She was silent a moment then she whispered, “Right.” She turned to the door and his hand gripped his bourbon so hard he had to focus everything on loosening his grip or the glass would shatter. Before she opened it, she turned back. “You don’t know, Cal, you have no idea. You’ve shut yourself up for so long in this fucking house with your tragic memories, you have no idea what’s about to walk out your door. Kate, Keira and me, we could have plugged that hole. We could have filled you so full, you’d be bursting. We would have loved that chance. We’d have given it everything we had, no matter the time that slid by, graduations, weddings, grandbabies, you’d have been a part of us and we’d have given everything we had to keep you so full, you’d be bursting.” Cal didn’t reply. “Joe,” she whispered, “you let me walk out this door, you’ll lose your chance.” Cal didn’t move. Vi waited. Cal stayed seated.

Living with life is very hard. Mostly we do our best to stifle life--to be tame or to be wanton. To be tranquillised or raging. Extremes have the same effect; they insulate us from the intensity of life. And extremes--whether of dullness or fury--successfully prevent feeling. I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies--unconscious strategies--to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. It can work the other way, too--sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life. It takes courage to feel the feeling--and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person. You know how in couples one person is always doing all the weeping or the raging while the other one seems so calm and reasonable? I understood that feelings were difficult for me although I was overwhelmed by them.

And I told you that one night wan't enough." Loki leaned down, kissing me deeply and pressing me to him. I didn't even attempt to resist. I wrapped my arms around his neck. It wasn't the we had kissed before, not as hungry or fevered. This was something different, nicer. We were holding onto each other, knowing this might be the last time we could. It felt sweet and hopeful and tragic all at once. When he stopped kissing me he rested his forehead against mine. He breathed as if struggling to catch his breath. i reached up and touched his face, his skin smooth and cool beneath my hand. Loki lifted his head so he could look me in the eyes, and I saw something in them, something I'd never seen before. Something pure and unadulterated, and my heart seemed to grow with the warmth of my love for him. I didn't know how it happened or when it had, but I knew it with complete certainty. I had fallen in love with Loki, more intensely than anything I had felt for anyone before.

It's said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken." I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.

The isolationists argued that if the US had stayed out of the Great War - or, as it later became known, World War I - there never would have been a World War II. By 1917 the warring protagonists - Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and others - had suffered millions of casualties and were exhausted. The German populace was starving. The isolationists believed that a resolution was inevitable without the US involvement that resulted in 116,000 dead fathers, brothers and sons.  They argued that if the United States had stayed out of the Great War, no one would ever have heard of Adolf Hitler.

What would happen if a man's face could adequately express his suffering, if his entire inner agony would be objectified in his facial expression? Could we still communicate? Wouldn't we then cover our faces with our hands while talking? Life would really be impossible if the infinitude of feelings we harbor within ourselves would be fully expressed in the lines of our face. Nobody would dare look at himself in the mirror, because a grotesque, tragic image would mix in the contours of his face with stains and traces of blood, wounds which cannot be healed, and unstoppable streams of tears. I would experience a kind of voluptuous awe if I could see a volcano of blood, eruptions as red as fire and as burning as despair, burst into the comfortable and superficial harmony of everyday life, or if I could see all our hidden wounds open, making of us a bloody eruption forever. Only then would be truly understand and appreciate the advantages of loneliness, which silences our suffering and makes it inaccessible. The venom drawn out from suffering would be enough to poison the whole world in a bloody eruption, bursting out of the volcano of our being. There is so much venom, so much poison, in suffering!

Yamamoto sensed a feeling of culmination about the huge success of the first strike, and the same incisive intuition that guided his brilliant moves at the gaming tables told him what the next move on the bridge of Akagi would be. In (Vice Admiral) Nagumo he knew his man. Nagumo had never been committed to the Pearl Harbor mission. He had not been Yamamoto’s choice to command the Striking Force; his assignment was the decision of the Navy Ministry in Tokyo, based on seniority. While the exultation of the officers and sailors on his staff swirled around him, Yamamoto sat quietly. Finally, he fixed a steely gaze on his chief of staff, and in a low, intense voice: “Admiral Nagumo is going to withdraw.

There is nothing so annoying as to be fairly rich, of a fairly good family, pleasing presence, average education, to be "not stupid," kindhearted, and yet to have no talent at all, no originality, not a single idea of one's own—to be, in fact, "just like everyone else." Of such people there are countless numbers in this world—far more even than appear. They can be divided into two classes as all men can—that is, those of limited intellect, and those who are much cleverer. The former of these classes is the happier. To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving. Many of our young women have thought fit to cut their hair short, put on blue spectacles, and call themselves Nihilists. By doing this they have been able to persuade themselves, without further trouble, that they have acquired new convictions of their own. Some men have but felt some little qualm of kindness towards their fellow-men, and the fact has been quite enough to persuade them that they stand alone in the van of enlightenment and that no one has such humanitarian feelings as they. Others have but to read an idea of somebody else's, and they can immediately assimilate it and believe that it was a child of their own brain. The "impudence of ignorance," if I may use the expression, is developed to a wonderful extent in such cases;—unlikely as it appears, it is met with at every turn. ... those belonged to the other class—to the "much cleverer" persons, though from head to foot permeated and saturated with the longing to be original. This class, as I have said above, is far less happy. For the "clever commonplace" person, though he may possibly imagine himself a man of genius and originality, none the less has within his heart the deathless worm of suspicion and doubt; and this doubt sometimes brings a clever man to despair. (As a rule, however, nothing tragic happens;—his liver becomes a little damaged in the course of time, nothing more serious. Such men do not give up their aspirations after originality without a severe struggle,—and there have been men who, though good fellows in themselves, and even benefactors to humanity, have sunk to the level of base criminals for the sake of originality)

It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. … You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! and chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' mother, who bore her child for love and love alone. You had your choice between Marx's insight into the productivity of your living labor power, which alone creates the value of commodities and the idea of the state. You forgot the living energy of your labor and chose the idea of the state. In the French Revolution, you had your choice between the cruel Robespierre and the great Danton. You chose cruelty and sent greatness and goodness to the guillotine. In Germany you had your choice between Goring and Himmler on the one hand and Liebknecht, Landau, and Muhsam on the other. You made Himmler your police chief and murdered your great friends. You had your choice between Julius Streicher and Walter Rathenau. You murdered Rathenau. You had your choice between Lodge and Wilson. You murdered Wilson. You had your choice between the cruel Inquisition and Galileo's truth. You tortured and humiliated the great Galileo, from whose inventions you are still benefiting, and now, in the twentieth century, you have brought the methods of the Inquisition to a new flowering. … Every one of your acts of smallness and meanness throws light on the boundless wretchedness of the human animal. 'Why so tragic?' you ask. 'Do you feel responsible for all evil?' With remarks like that you condemn yourself. If, little man among millions, you were to shoulder the barest fraction of your responsibility, the world would be a very different place. Your great friends wouldn't perish, struck down by your smallness.

It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slipping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist‘s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different. This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss. Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target, hit the wrong one. For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck. By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of wild horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succor and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration thereby fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contributing to the field of tone poetry. Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.

I saw a banner hanging next to city hall in downtown Philadelphia that read, "Kill them all, and let God sort them out." A bumper sticker read, "God will judge evildoers; we just have to get them to him." I saw a T-shirt on a soldier that said, "US Air Force... we don't die; we just go to hell to regroup." Others were less dramatic- red, white, and blue billboards saying, "God bless our troops." "God Bless America" became a marketing strategy. One store hung an ad in their window that said, "God bless America--$1 burgers." Patriotism was everywhere, including in our altars and church buildings. In the aftermath of September 11th, most Christian bookstores had a section with books on the event, calendars, devotionals, buttons, all decorated in the colors of America, draped in stars and stripes, and sprinkled with golden eagles. This burst of nationalism reveals the deep longing we all have for community, a natural thirst for intimacy... September 11th shattered the self-sufficient, autonomous individual, and we saw a country of broken fragile people who longed for community- for people to cry with, be angry with, to suffer with. People did not want to be alone in their sorrow, rage, and fear. But what happened after September 11th broke my heart. Conservative Christians rallies around the drums of war. Liberal Christian took to the streets. The cross was smothered by the flag and trampled under the feet of angry protesters. The church community was lost, so the many hungry seekers found community in the civic religion of American patriotism. People were hurting and crying out for healing, for salvation in the best sense of the word, as in the salve with which you dress a wound. A people longing for a savior placed their faith in the fragile hands of human logic and military strength, which have always let us down. They have always fallen short of the glory of God. ...The tragedy of the church's reaction to September 11th is not that we rallied around the families in New York and D.C. but that our love simply reflected the borders and allegiances of the world. We mourned the deaths of each soldier, as we should, but we did not feel the same anger and pain for each Iraqi death, or for the folks abused in the Abu Ghraib prison incident. We got farther and farther from Jesus' vision, which extends beyond our rational love and the boundaries we have established. There is no doubt that we must mourn those lives on September 11th. We must mourn the lives of the soldiers. But with the same passion and outrage, we must mourn the lives of every Iraqi who is lost. They are just as precious, no more, no less. In our rebirth, every life lost in Iraq is just as tragic as a life lost in New York or D.C. And the lives of the thirty thousand children who die of starvation each day is like six September 11ths every single day, a silent tsunami that happens every week.

The Times 2 July 1952 WAS BRITISH BARONESS WORKING FOR THE NAZIS IN PARIS? By Philip Bing-Wallace It was alleged that Baroness Freya Saumures (who claimed to be of Swedish descent but is a British subject) was one of the many women that entertained the Gestapo and SS during the occupation of Paris, a jury was told. At the baroness’s trial today, the Old Bailey heard Daniel Merrick-James QC, prosecuting council, astonish the jury by revealing that Baroness Freya Saumures allegedly worked with the Nazis throughout the Nazi occupation of Paris. There was a photograph of a woman in a headscarf and dark glasses, alongside a tall dark-haired man who had a protective arm around her, his face shielded by his hand. A description beneath the image read: Baroness Saumures with her husband, Baron Ferdinand Saumures, outside the Old Bailey after her acquittal. Alec could not see her face fully, but the picture of the baron, even partially obscured, certainly looked very like the man lying dead in the Battersea Park Road crypt. Alec read on. When Mr Merrick-James sat, a clerk of the court handed the judge, Justice Henry Folks, a note. The judge then asked the court to be cleared. Twenty minutes later, the court was reconvened. Justice Folks announced to the jury that the prosecution had dropped all charges and that Lady Saumures was acquitted. There was no explanation for the acquittal. The jury was dismissed with thanks. Neither Baron nor Baroness Saumures had any comment. Baron and Baroness Saumures live in West Sussex and are well known to a select group for their musical evenings and events. They are also well known for protecting their privacy. Alec rummaged on. It was getting close to lunchtime and his head was beginning to ache.

Life is Beautiful? Beyond all the vicissitudes that are presented to us on this short path within this wild planet, we can say that life is beautiful. No one can ever deny that experiencing the whirlwind of emotions inside this body is a marvel, we grow with these life experiences, we strengthen ourselves and stimulate our feelings every day, in this race where the goal is imminent death sometimes we are winners and many other times we lose and the darkness surprises us and our heart is disconnected from this reality halfway and connects us to the server of the matrix once more, debugging and updating our database, erasing all those experiences within this caracara of flesh and blood, waiting to return to earth again. "Life is beautiful gentlemen" is cruel and has unfair behavior about people who looked like a bundle of light and left this platform for no apparent reason, but its nature is not similar to our consciousness and feelings, she has a script for each of us because it was programmed that way, the architects of the game of life they know perfectly well that you must experiment with all the feelings, all the emotions and evolve to go to the next levels. You can't take a quantum leap and get through the game on your own. inventing a heaven and a hell in order to transcend, that comes from our fears of our imagination not knowing what life has in store for us after life is a dilemma "rather said" the best kept secret of those who control us day by day. We are born, we grow up, we are indoctrinated in the classrooms and in the jobs, we pay our taxes, we reproduce, we enjoy the material goods that it offers us the system the marketing of disinformation, Then we get old, get sick and die. I don't like this story! It looks like a parody of Noam Chomsky, Let's go back to the beautiful description of beautiful life, it sounds better! Let's find meaning in all the nonsense that life offers us, 'Cause one way or another we're doomed to imagine that everything will be fine until the end of matter. It is almost always like that. Sometimes life becomes a real nightmare. A heartbreaking horror that we find impossible to overcome. As we grow up, we learn to know the dark side of life. The terrors that lurk in the shadows, the dangers lurking around every corner. We realize that reality is much harsher and ruthless than we ever imagined. And in those moments, when life becomes a real hell, we can do nothing but cling to our own existence, summon all our might and fight with all our might so as not to be dragged into the abyss. But sometimes, even fighting with all our might is not enough. Sometimes fate is cruel and takes away everything we care about, leaving us with nothing but pain and hopelessness. And in that moment, when all seems lost, we realize the terrible truth: life is a death trap, a macabre game in which we are doomed to lose. And so, as we sink deeper and deeper into the abyss, while the shadows envelop us and terror paralyzes us, we remember the words that once seemed to us so hopeful: life is beautiful. A cruel and heartless lie, that leads us directly to the tragic end that death always awaits us.

No, you don't feel it now. Some day, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with itshideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly.Now, wherever you go, you charm the world. Will it always be so? . . . You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr. Gray. Don't frown. You have. And beauty is a form of genius-- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.You smile? Ah! when you have lost it you won't smile. . . . People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial.That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders.It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. . . . Yes, Mr. Gray, the gods have been good to you.But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully.When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats.Every month as it wanes brings you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly.... Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days,listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure,or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals,of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. . . . A new Hedonism-- that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol.With your personality there is nothing you could not do.The world belongs to you for a season. . . . The moment I met you I saw that you were quite unconscious of what you really are, of what you really might be. There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself.I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such a little time that your youth will last--such a little time.The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again.The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now.In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!