Dramatizing Quotes & Sayings

You were coshed with a fireplace poker," Mrs. Seaton said, bending over him to sift through the hair above his nape. "These wounds will require careful cleaning." She wadded up his shirt and folded it to hold against the scalp wound. "Passive voice," the earl said through clenched teeth, "will not protect you, Mrs. Seaton, since you did the coshing. Jesus and the apostles, that hurts." Her hand came up to hold his forehead even as she continued to press the linen of his ruined shirt against the bleeding wound. "The bleeding is slowing down," she said, "and the wounds on your back are not as messy." "Happily for me," her patient muttered. — Grace Burrowes

This needs to work on that level, but it has the additional strain of it's going to be profoundly scrutinized by political junkies from the right and the left who will pick apart every little thing. We are inherently dramatizing Hillary Rodham, or Hillary Clinton, who's a very famous figure. There's a lot of biographies about her, but there's also elements that are private moments, that are dramatized with an arc, and we have to take creative license. Everything is sort of a cost-benefit. — James Ponsoldt

Stars - spectacular representations of living human beings - project this general banality into images of permitted roles. As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live. The function of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner. They embody the inaccessible results of social labor by dramatizing the by-products of that labor which are magically projected above it as its ultimate goals: power and vacations - the decisionmaking and consumption that are at the beginning and the end of a process that is never questioned. On one hand, a governmental power may personalize itself as a pseudostar; on the other, a star of consumption may campaign for recognition as a pseudopower over life. But the activities of these stars are not really free, and they offer no real choices. — Guy Debord

[I]t is remarkable how much sheer bullshit seems to accrete around the subject of barbecue. No other kind of cooking comes even close. Exactly why, I'm not sure, but it may be that cooking over fire is so straightforward that the people who do it feel a need to baste the process in thick layers of intricacy and myth. It could also be that barbecue is performed disproportionately by self-dramatizing men. — Michael Pollan

The violence in the Executioner books is merely stage-dressing for dramatizing the commitment and dedication Bolan has to his ideals and the lengths to which he will go to honor them. We can learn this message of love and commitment and carry it into our own lives without the violence and bloodshed, and of course it is this wish that fuels the writing. I do not want my readers to pick up a gun and follow Bolan's example; I want them to be stirred by his commitment and to find ways to meet the same challenges without resort to violent means. — Don Pendleton

If modern civilization should disappear today, but leave libraries untouched, survivors could open almost any book and perceive immediately that persons living south of the Sahara are called "Blacks." The term "Black Africa" would suffice to indicate the habitat of the Black race. Nothing similar is found in Egyptian texts. Whenever the Egyptians use the word "Black" (khem), it is to designate themselves or their country: Kemit, land of the Blacks. — Cheikh Anta Diop

On account of its scale and complexity, the world will always outstrip the capacity of any single body to ask fertile questions of it. — Alain De Botton

Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and conflicts it brought. — George Packer

The assumption that the gospel can be reduced to a note card is already off on the wrong track. — Scot McKnight

I began as a dramatist in the theater, so I'm always thinking about how a story moves, what it looks like, how to engage the senses, how dialogue sounds, what feels authentic and sounds real, what's funny, how to build distinctive and original characters - all the aspects of playwriting, scene-building, the architecture of dramatizing. — Adriana Trigiani

I'm so not macho. It's crazy. My man cave is so not a man cave. — Dave Grohl

[Science fiction's] most important use, I submit, is a means of dramatizing social inquiry, as providing a fictional mode in which cultural tendencies can be isolated and judged. — Kingsley Amis

Nothing disfigures the intellectual's public
performance as much as trimming, careful silence, patriotic bluster, and retrospective and self-dramatizing apostasy. — Edward Said

Just because you have been through a bad experience does not give you the ticket to keep going back to that situation over and over again and dramatizing it out of proportion. — Stephen Richards

I want to write about serious things, but I want to write about them in a way that makes them accessible to a large number of people - to take them through the argument by dramatizing the circumstances in which these issues are being discussed. — Sebastian Faulks

no matter the acuity of our senses, no matter how educated we are or how good we are or how much conviction we live our lives with, we can never experience the wholeness of the answer within our own fragile and limited selves. We need one another to achieve a vision of wholeness. — John Cullinan

I believe myself to be the type of person who does not complicate his life. I have always lived my life without dramatizing things, whether the good things that have happened to me or the bad. I simply live those moments. — Jose Saramago

Man kills, the things he love the most, sometimes by the virtue of hatred, crime, anger and war and sometimes by dramatizing his activities. But he is not aware that his killings are his own self-image. — Santosh Kalwar

A set of rules laid out by professionals to show the way they would like to act if it was profitable. — Frank Dane

Mom's a hypochondriac, too, so the best part was that every week she would get the disease that the medical shows were dramatizing. I'll never forget, they did an episode on sickle cell anemia, which as far as I know, is almost exclusively an African-American affliction. — Kathy Griffin

I first went to Indonesia in 2001 for six months. I was to help a community of plantation workers to make a film documenting and dramatizing the struggle to organize a union in the aftermath of the Suharto dictatorship. — Joshua Oppenheimer

The trouble with my generation is that we all think we're fucking geniuses. Making something isn't good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something; we have to be something. — Nick Hornby

Being able to sync the same content among multiple devices provides a very convenient backup for Dropbox data. If your Mac laptop gets dropped in your backyard swimming pool, as long as it's been recently synced, you'll still be able to quickly access all of the files and folders stored in Dropbox folder on the desktop PC. — Ian Lamont

There is a difference between dramatizing your sensibility and your personality. The literary works which we think of as classicsdid the former. Much modern writing does the latter, and so has an affinity with, say, night-club acts in all their shoddy immediacy. — Paul Horgan

It's just like a big chunk of me has been ripped out and I'm not quite whole. I don't think I'm over dramatizing it, and I'm certainly deserving of it, but the way I feel now, it's just like you're talking to someone who is terminally ill and facing death. Death would be preferable to what I am facing. I just feel like imploding upon myself, you know? I just want to go somewhere and disappear. — Jeffrey Dahmer

Because people don't have wings, they look for ways to fly. — Haruichi Furudate

Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides. — Walter Kirn

Doctors estimate that seventy to eighty percent of their business is non-health-related. People aren't sick, they're self-dramatizing. Sometimes the hardest part of a medical job is keeping a straight face. — Steven Pressfield

Never tempt fate. It plays for keeps. — Seanan McGuire

Much more than an entertaining set of exaggerated facts, fiction is a metaphoric method of describing, dramatizing and condensing historical events, personal actions, psychological states and the symbolic knowledge encoded within the collective unconscious; things, events and conditions that are otherwise too diffuse and/or complex to be completely digested or appreciated by the prevailing culture. — Tom Robbins

I am proud to be a Turk, and to write in Turkish about Turkey - and to have been translated into about 40 languages. But I don't want to politicize things by dramatizing them. — Orhan Pamuk

We know about the socially complex lives of elephants: how they communicate, how they bond, how they even seem to grieve. We have ethologists in the field and activists on the ground to thank for that knowledge. — K.A. Applegate

Our refuge is being exactly where we are - not dramatizing problems by replaying them in our heads, telling stories to our friends, eliciting sympathy and convincing ourselves that this is a very big deal. Our refuge is in the stillness of being the compassionate witness to our panic and fear - not judging it as good or bad, just accepting the what is of the moment. — Charlotte Kasl