And in this respect the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a tragedy a clash between one very powerful very convincing very painful claim over this land and another no less powerful no less convincing claim.

There is no tragedy in missing a putt no matter how short. All have erred in this respect.

It isn't fate but fecklessness that has shoved Sarah Palin to the sidelines of national politics. The real tragedy is that she's taken a lot of other serious Republican women with her.

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

The government needs to help those in need but members of Congress shouldn't take advantage of the situation and use a national tragedy as an opportunity to spend taxpayer dollars on their pet projects.

It would behoove the world to become used to this fact: that without a just solution to the Palestine tragedy there can be no stable peace in the Middle East.

And I have lived since - as you have - in a period of cold war during which we have ensured by our achievements in the science and technology of destruction that a third act in this tragedy of war will result in the peace of extinction.

Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting.

Plot rules nor even poetry are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature of character of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.

In some ways my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy really and loss.