Greek Tragedy Quotes

The 'I' character in journalism is almost pure invention.

People try to make a Greek tragedy of my life, and they can't do it. I'm too happy.

My first job was a Greek tragedy, and ever since, one job just seemed to roll onto the next. I've been terribly lucky.

I'm drawn to a lot of tragedies, and I love a Greek tragedy.But I would think - I start thinking realistically about it, and performing eight days a week, that would take a toll. I take things to heart. I don't know if I could survive, like, "Medea."

As Agatha Swanburne once said, 'To be kept waiting is unfortunate, but to be kept waiting with nothing interesting to read is a tragedy of Greek proportions.

I've come to realize that life is not a musical comedy, it's a Greek tragedy.

I often teach a graduate theater seminar on Greek tragedy in performance. I usually begin by saying that no matter what technological advances occur, the wisdom of these plays will never be obsolete.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

I don't write fantasy, I write reality. Also, my novels have roots to Greek tragedies and as such, there has to be tragedy.

Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.

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

I perform regularly with a theater company called Outside the Wire who take performances of Greek tragedy to American-military audiences around the world to create discussion about PTSD and soldier suicide. It's one of the greatest things I've ever been asked to do as an actor.

In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.

Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.

The Greek tragedies and comedies are like a roadmap to all the ways in which trying to live this rich, full life can go wrong. You could get into a war. You could find that you have members of your family on the wrong side of a political crisis. You could be raped. You could find that your child has gone crazy because of some horrible experience she's had.

Conflict is the basis of drama. I guess that goes back as long as time has existed as far as mankind is concerned, dating back to the Greek tragedies or the Old Testament. And violence is a form of conflict, so whether that's catharsis or whether that has some socially damaging effect on audiences - I suppose that would just depend.

Frequently my life has been likened to a Greek tragedy, and the actress in me cannot deny that comparison.

I always think a good sports movie is emblematic in the same way that a great Greek tragedy really has a certain kind of structure, or a Shakespearean play if you're looking at a comedy or a tragedy, is that these are the heights and depths of human emotion.

I'm intrigued by the classic Greek tragedies, as well as by the idea of the Greek chorus.

The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.

Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.

I'm running out of time, and a Western is America's answer to a Greek tragedy, so that's what we did. [Kiefer] hired Brad [Mirman] to write the script and he had the ideas, and then he and I did stuff on the script to make it a little cleaner to ourselves. And then, we played it. We were just actors working together, and our DNA must have informed it somehow. Certainly, we came out of it purified a little bit.

Blind hope. Blind hope is all we have. There's a Greek tragedy called Prometheus Bound; Prometheus is the [titan] that gave humans fire. He's chained to a rock and bemoaning his fate and saying, "I gave you everything. By giving you fire, I gave you blind hope. By giving you a little light that kept you warm at night, I let you believe that this was all going to be okay." For me, that's what art has been. Music and books, it's an act of hope to make them, and it's an act of hope to listen to them. That hope will be dashed, you will say goodbye.

Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.

Sometimes bad luck hits you like in an ancient Greek tragedy, and it's not your own making. When you have a plane crash, it's not your fault.

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

Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. In other countries, the business of laughing is left to the viewers. Here, their laughter is put on the screen, integrated into the show. It is the screen that is laughing and having a good time. You are simply left alone with your consternation.

The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

The ‘I’ character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike the ‘I’ of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the ‘I’ of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way—the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent. The journalistic ‘I’ is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.

What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason — instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.