Tragedy Quotes

“It is of our nature to exceed ourselves. Overflowing the mesaure is built into what we are. So, too, is rejoicing in this superabundance for its own sake. Yet too lavish an excess, like too vaulting an ambition, may lead us to overreach ourselves and bring ourselves to nothing. Like Lady Macbeh, one can forget that constraints (the demands of kinship or hospitality, for example) are costitutive of the self, not simply obstacles to its expression.”
― Terry Eagleton, Tragedy

“The inmates of Belsen or Buchenwald did not have to die hallowed by their sufferings, or with a brave resignation to their fate, or conscious of themselves as world-historical figures, or exulting in the thought that, though they themselves might perish, the human spirit itself is invincible, in order to earn the title of tragic. They simply had to be men and women in an intolerable situation. The banal truth is that one does not need to do anything in particular to qualify as a tragic protagonist. One simply has to be a human being at the end of one’s tether. One does not have to be virtuous, only virtuous enough not to deserve the wretchedness to which you are reduced.”
― Terry Eagleton, Tragedy