Quotes & Sayings About Melodrama

I'm obsessive about the kind of melodrama of getting through the days and trying to make them good and funny and a happy experience. But my feeling towards the fans is that they delivered me from darkness. — Tom Baker

Nicole's door opened, and she stomped down the hall. "I have something to say," she said, giving him the Slitty Eyes of Death. "You're totally unfair, and if I run away, you shouldn't be surprised." "Don't make me put a computer chip in your ear," Liam answered. "It's not funny! I hate you." "Well, I love you, even if you did ruin my life by turning into a teenager," he said, rubbing his eyes. "Did you study for your test?" "Yes." "Good." He looked at his daughter - so much like Emma, way too pretty. Why weren't there convent schools anymore? Or chastity belts? "Want some supper? I saved your plate." She rolled her eyes with all the melodrama a teenager could muster. "Fine. I may as well become a fat pig since I can't ever go on a date." "That's my girl," he said and, grinning, got up to heat up her dinner. — Kristan Higgins

Extremely self-conscious in its craft, in many ways The Hand of Ethelberta is an exploration of fiction as illusion, which involves parody of the conventions it employs; romance, melodrama and farce, and a rejection of realism for absurdist and surrealistic effects. The 'hand' of Ethelberta is an obvious, ironic allusion to courtship, and the sub-title, 'A Comedy in Chapters', suggests the novel's affinity with the conventions of Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy of manners. — Geoffrey Harvey

I came to this project and 'Far from Heaven' from completely different vantage points. 'Heaven' was of course about the Douglas Sirk films of that period, with the very specific cinematic language and style of melodrama. With 'Carol,' it was presented to me already packaged, with Cate Blanchett attached and Phyllis Nagy's script complete - when it came to me it had a long history and pre-history. — Todd Haynes

I love 'Glee.' I cry all the time when I watch 'Glee' because I don't know if it's satire or melodrama and that makes me feel like the writing is aware of itself, and that makes it okay to cry. — David Sedaris

Our final hours together were predictable: the temperature of the arguments rising, the almost comic melodrama of the play beginning. Faces, masks. One shouting, the other crying; and then, change masks. For one, two, three, six hours, until the world finally falls apart: tomorrow, this Sunday, next Wednesday, Christmas. But in the end, a strange peace, gathered from who knows what rotten gut. — Valeria Luiselli

There is a fine line I have to walk throughout the writing process in a novel. It is this line between drama and melodrama, and it is this line between evoking genuine emotional power and being manipulative. — Nicholas Sparks

'Somewhere in Time' is in the top-five cheesiest movies ever made. It's super melodrama. — Mark Duplass

So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less. — Douglas Sirk

Lady Amunsdale," Talia said, looking around the room.
Nothing. Ridiculous.
She tried again, louder, with melodrama. "Lady Amunsdale. Please grace us with your presence."
All quiet.
Jim buried his face in his hands, his bald head reddening. Talia felt bad for her mocking tone. The man was crazy, but also desperately in love.
"You're too nice," Adam observed. "It might take more of a command to get her to come out."
Talia rolled her eyes. A command - those came all too easy to Adam. This was the last time, and she was done.
She raised her voice. "Lady Amunsdale. Come here. Now."
A pause, then a distorted voice whined. — Erin Kellison

He was rather a low sort of pony. The fact is, he had been originally jobbed out by the day, and he never quite got over his old habits. He was clever in melodrama too, but too broad
too broad. When the mother died, he took the port-wine business.'
'The port-wine business!' cried Nicholas.
'Drinking port-wine with the clown,' said the manager; 'but he was greedy, and one night bit off the bowl of the glass, and choked himself, so his vulgarity was the death of him at last. — Charles Dickens

I might say that we have paid for freedom. But I have had enough melodrama in this life, and would willingly give my five senses if they could ensure us our present peace and security. Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind of course we have on moments of depression; but there are other moments too, when time, unmeasured by the clock, runs on into eternity. — Daphne Du Maurier

I tend to avoid melodrama. I try to create very realistic settings and very realistic experiences and realistic responses to these experiences. Melodrama is the use of really big events that may or may not happen in real life - certainly they do, but they're not events that are common to most people. Most of the things that happen in my novels are things that could happen to people in real life. — Nicholas Sparks

You just make a game out of relaxing in the face of its melodrama. You simply learn how to release the tendency for getting drawn into the energy. — Michael A. Singer

While my father was out boozing, she'd read to me by the stub of a candle, a thread of soot twisting upwards from its pinched, meager flame. By her voice alone, she could raise up the old stories from the bones of their words and--lilting between shades of comedy and melodrama--turn the dreary space around me into a stage for my wildest imaginings. — Norman Lock

A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self - a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. There is a theatrical quality about all this, and during the next several days, as I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn't shake off a sense of melodrama - a melodrama in which I, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and lone member of the audience. — William Styron

If you want to be happy, you have to let go of the part of you that wants to create melodrama. This is the part that thinks there's a reason not to be happy. You have to transcend the personal, and as you do, you will naturally awaken to the higher aspects of your being. In the end, enjoying life's experiences is the only rational thing to do. You're sitting on a planet spinning around in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Go ahead, take a look at reality. You're floating in empty space in a universe that goes on forever. If you have to be here, at least be happy and enjoy the experience. You're going to die anyway. Things are going to happen anyway. Why shouldn't you be happy? You gain nothing by being bothered by life's events. It doesn't change the world; you just suffer. There's always going to be something that can bother you, if you let it. — Michael A. Singer

Honestly, I'd rather be anywhere else. Even home, where my dad begins almost every conversation with, "You should lose the black clothes and wear something with color." Puh-lease. Like I want to look like every Barbie clone in Hell High, a.k.a. Oklahoma's insignificant Haloway High School. Ironically, Dad doesn't appreciate the bright blue streaks in my originally blond/now-dyed-black hair. Go figure. That's color, right? — Gena Showalter

Sentimental blackmailing is the melodrama done by heart over our brain. — Upasana Banerjee

Golf is 20 percent mechanics and technique. The other 80 pecent is philosophy, humor, tragedy, romance, melodrama, companionship, camaraderie, cussedness and conversation. — Grantland Rice

Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others-in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance-they were almost in the nature of a continuous performance. — Gertrude Atherton

I love how 'melodrama' is a denigrated term - a lower-class citizen to other genres. And yet that's what life is, man. — Todd Haynes

Shredded feelings are the fuel that feed the machinery of melodrama. And good melodrama just has honest feelings and is honest about the way people interact. — Guy Maddin

He called me his 'dream.' I guess now I've become his nightmare. — Richard Finney

Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant. — Jesse Kellerman

The cigarette represents a simple pleasure coupled with self-destruction and defiance of death. Melodrama — Benjamin Doolin

I found myself scooting behind the coffee table like the outraged virgin in some Victorian melodrama. "Jack, this isn't a good time. I'm really tired and I'm not thinking straight."
"That's what makes it a great time. If you were rested and sober, it'd be a hell of a lot harder to argue with you."
-Ella & Jack — Lisa Kleypas

I've always loved Victorian melodrama. And I've always liked larger-than-life theater, providing it's truthful and honest. I like what the theater can provide in energy and bombast - I enjoy it when it's large, and by that I don't mean in size, I mean in emotions. Shakespeare did that. — Harold Prince

While the melodrama of hucking crates of tea into Boston Harbor continues to inspire civic-minded hotheads to this day, it's worth remembering the hordes of stoic colonial women who simply swore off tea and steeped basil leaves in boiling water to make the same point. What's more valiant: littering from a wharf or years of doing chores and looking after children from dawn to dark without caffeine? — Sarah Vowell

How shall I typify what happened? Passion play? Somewhat. Weird tale? Indubitably. Horror story? Pretty close. Grotesque melodrama? Certainly. Black comedy? Your point of view will determine that. Perhaps it was a combination of them all ...
So, to the story. A chronicle of greed and cruelty, horror and rapacity, sadism and murder.
Love, American style. — Richard Matheson

I figured this staying up meant something. Maybe it was loss or love or some other word that we say when it's too fucking late but the boys weren't into melodrama. They heard that shit and said no. Especially the Old Man. Divorced at twenty, with two kids down in D.C., neither of which he sees anymore. He heard me and said, Listen. There are forty-four ways to get over this. He showed me his bitten-up hands. — Junot Diaz

Opera was an enormous part of my childhood. My parents were both opera buffs, and they met in the box seat of an opera performance. And I also was a boy soprano, so before puberty hit, I was onstage playing a wide variety of orphans and urchins in all sorts of operas, and the sheer melodrama of their stories was just always appealing to me. — Daniel Handler

We always knew that we didn't want to show Alan Turing in the act of suicide - it was our feeling that would tip over into melodrama too quickly and seem over-the-top. — Graham Moore

If a man went simply by what he saw, he might be tempted to affirm that the essence of democracy is melodrama. — Irving Babbitt

And I have two eyes. I've seen that little melodrama play out between you and that other tracker. Fish? Flounder? What's his name? — Amanda Hocking

What Mr Blyth has been engaged in was not love, my dear Francis. It was romance, a thing to which Mr Blyth has been very prone; together with melodrama. Whatever made you think that melodrama makes Mr Blyth uncomfortable? He revels in it. — Dorothy Dunnett

Of course real horror does not depend upon the melodrama of shadows or even the conspiracies of night. — Mark Z. Danielewski

One can play comedy, two are required for melodrama, but a tragedy demands three. — Elbert Hubbard

Melodrama is something that is created ... I don't seen a melodramatic episode of '90210' or any show that relies on that and think, 'Oh, that's life. That's how I experience it.' — Peter Horton

The three of you are enough to drive a mara mad.'She can wear my shirt," she growled in an imitation of Nash."No,she can wear my shirt,"she said switching to Tod's smoother tone.Then Sabine took off down the hall without a glance at any of us."I have a spare. Come on, Kaylee,before I choke on testosterone and melodrama. — Rachel Vincent

The constraints of melodrama can be a great blessing, because they demand that all the characters involved - as absurd and extreme as they may initially seem - must stay utterly rooted in their own reality, or the whole project collapses. — Stanley Tucci

Her life was a slow realization that the world was not for her and that for whatever reason she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. table ivory elephant charm rainbow onion hairdo violence melodrama honey ... None of it moved her. She addressed the world honestly searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her but to each she would have to say I don't love you. — Jonathan Safran Foer

If I feel like crying, I'll just cry in a dream. Something I really try not to do in my waking hours. I like good melodrama because it's just an undumping of all these compulsions we feel that we work so hard to master during our waking hours. No wonder we crash to sleep in bed at night. We have to, otherwise we'd just spend our waking hours shredding the feelings from everybody else. — Guy Maddin

He had the air of a spy in a melodrama, missing nothing, liking nothing, looking forward to the great day when everything would be turned upside down. — Kurt Vonnegut

The quirky little melodrama that unfolded in Bosnia on 28 June 1914 played the same role in the history of the world as might a wasp sting on a chronically ailing man who is maddened into abandoning a sickbed to devote his waning days to destroying the nest — Max Hastings

Keep the fucking melodrama to a minimum."
(Sin) — Santino Hassell

When we seek from Zen (or from any spiritual path) the fulfillment of our fantasies, we separate from the earth and sky, from our loved ones, from our aching backs and hearts, from the very soles of our feet. Such fantasies insulate us for a time; yet in ten thousand ways reality intrudes, and our lives become anxious scurrying, quiet desperation, confusing melodrama. — Charlotte Joko Beck

All the political angst and moral melodrama about getting 'the rich' to pay 'their fair share' is part of a big charade. This is not about economics, it is about politics. — Thomas Sowell

My silence knot is tied up in my hair; as if to keep my love out of my eyes. I cannot speak to one for whom i care. A hatpin serves as part of my disguise.
In the play, my role is baticeer; a word which here means "person who trains bats." The audience may feel a prick of fear, as if sharp pins are hidden in thier hats.
My co-star lives on what we call a brae. His solitude might not be just an act. A piece of mail fails to arrive one day. This poignant melodrama's based on fact.
The curtain falls just as the knot unties; the silence is broken by the one who dies. — Lemony Snicket

Say what you like about melodrama, it beats confusion. The truth is we ought have a chance to say a little something when it's getting dark. We ought to have a closing scene. — Leif Enger

I love you."

"Wow. That too on Valentine's Day!"

"That's just a coincidence."

A perfect love story started to brew as they embarked on a journey of love and romance. The day the world celebrated love was the day they would start their love story too. What a perfect melodrama, even the best of romantic movies might not have such a climax. A perfect love story was just brewing. — Jagdish Joghee

In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters. — Sidney Lumet

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama. — Lillian Hellman

Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn't bring death home to anyone- it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says- 'One day you are going to die. — Tom Stoppard

Try to avoid falseness and strain. Write what you really know about. Make it new. Don't invent melodrama for the sake of it. Don't try to run, let alone fly, before you can walk with ease. — A.S. Byatt

If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the worldis provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated ... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce. — Eric Bentley

On the golf course, a man may be the dogged victim of inexorable fate, be struck down by an appalling stroke of tragedy, become the hero of unbelievable melodrama, or the clown in a side-splitting comedy. — Bobby Jones

History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that. — Robert Penn Warren

Tragedy and comedy involve an audience, so they must give--sharing themselves to elicit tears and laughter. Melodrama is not such a strategist. It meets no one's expectation but its internal need to feel. — Yiyun Li

I can say without melodrama or malice that Hollywood ruined my life. — Jerome Charyn

Isn't it strange how life turns into melodrama? — Alan Moore

Melodrama is one of my working tools and it enables me to obtain effects that would be unobtainable otherwise; on the other hand I am not deliberately melodramatic; don't get too annoyed if I say that I write in the way that I do because I am what I am. — Graham Greene

Exaggeration is the melodramatic child of truth. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

Padre Blazon was almost shouting by this time, and I had to hush him. People in the restaurant were staring, and one or two of the ladies of devout appearance were heaving their bosoms indignantly. He swept the room with the wild eyes of a conspirator in a melodrama and dropped his voice to a hiss. Fragments of food, ejected from his mouth by this jet, flew about the table. [p.201] — Robertson Davies

Parsi theater was known for melodrama. — Irrfan Khan

The problem play is a melodrama cleansed of invention. — David Mamet

But I have had enough melodrama in this life, and would willingly give my five senses if they could ensure us our present peace and security. Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind. Of course we have our moments of depression; but there are other moments too, when time, unmeasured by the clock, runs on into eternity and, catching his smile, I know we are together, we march in unison, no flash of thought or opinion makes a barrier between us. — Daphne Du Maurier

We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama. — Adrienne Rich

I doubt whether any hack, under pressure, could pen such atrocious melodrama, — John Kennedy Toole

The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in melodramatic plots. — P. J. O'Rourke

All good, clean stories are melodrama; it's just the set of devices that determines how you show or hide it. — Baz Luhrmann

We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things. — Richard Flanagan

I think of myself as a realistic writer, not a creator of soap opera or melodrama. — Joyce Maynard

...Such a subcontinental thing to do, no? To bury what is difficult and painful in cerebral things. To let the intellect soak up the blood from a fight. This is what we do. Not because we lack sensitivity, but because we lack the right language for emotion. English has such a jealous hold over us, but it is a hard and brittle thing in our hands. It doesn't suit the easy melodrama of our natures. And it has a way of making matters of the heart seem at once inert and deeply shameful. So what do upper-class Indian men do when they are too wretched to do anything else? They talk of the Russians! Of Dostoevsky and Belinsky, of "cultural schizophrenia" and "the lackeyishness of thinking"... — Aatish Taseer

Turn your melodrama into a mellow drama. — Ram Dass

It's been really important to me to create moments where there's a breath or moments where there's a laugh or moments where there's real life that's allowed to seep in through the cracks of whatever melodrama is happening, because that's what does happen in life. — Sarah Polley

If I'm going to go to the opera, I want to see the costumes and the melodrama. — Jaime Winstone

I love melodrama. I love the simple fact. When you read Euripides he's a page turner. It's like reading a Mexican comic book romance. — Guy Maddin

She often felt like she had been cast in a supporting
role with the film that was Louise. And there was more melodrama to be found there than a full-scale Merchant-Ivory period production. Tonight, she was certain, would be no exception. — Kerri Thomson

Melodrama and melodramatic are not the same thing, and often people make the mistake of confusing the two. — James Gray

Commercialism is laying its great greasy paw upon everything including the irresponsible quest of thrills; so that, whatever democracy may be theoretically, one is sometimes tempted to define it practically as standardized and commercialized melodrama. — Irving Babbitt

When people look at me, they automatically assume I'm dark and weird. Why can't they see the truth? I'm just a girl, trying to find my place in the world. — Gena Showalter

Even the favorite reviews, the audience response is the movie is too slow, deliberately slow. But for the Chinese audience, the biggest complaint is it happens too quick. I think the historical background that build into our genes is different. American people has never been occupied. The deep sadness and sentimentality, the cultural background that relates to melodrama that we relate to and grow up with, the propaganda, I didn't imagine the difference is so big. It's a very interesting cultural phenomenon. — Ang Lee

In serious Victorian fiction, as in Shakespearian tragedy, melodrama normally functions as metaphor. The author finds a vivid equivalent for a reality too elaborate or too extended to be briefly depicted. — Ian Gregor

ADMIRABLY BOLD. There's something grand about the film's sincerity and the intensity of its emotions and something fresh and bold about the way director Gray uses the conventions of romantic melodrama. — A.O. Scott

egocentric melodrama. — David Michie

I extract significance from melodrama, a significance which it does not in fact contain; but occasionally, from out of this matter, there escapes a thin beam of light that, seen at the right angle, can crack the shell of mortality. — Tom Stoppard

Without conscious thought I stepped behind the altar, raised my arms, and began the celebration of the Eucharist. There was no sense of parody or melodrama in this act, no symbolism or hidden intention; it was merely the automatic reaction of a priest who had said Mass almost daily for more than forty-six years of his life and who now faced the prospect of never again participating in the reassuring ritual of that celebration. It — Dan Simmons

I thought you were talking figuratively! I kept asking and you kept saying, "An entrance to Hell," so I thought, Very well, Cabal, have your moment of melodrama now and bathos later when it turns out your talking about Ipswitch or somewhere, but you meant it. You actually meant it literally. — Jonathan L. Howard

We need to get out," I said. My voice sounded raw to me. "Trouble coming."
"No," said a beautiful Sidhe baritone. "Trouble is here."
They appeared from behind their veils, one by one, with so much melodrama that I was mildly surprised that they hadn't each struck some kind of kung fu pose. — Jim Butcher

I think that's what distinguishes Schmidt, really. In the movies now, so much of what is appealing to an audience is the dramatic or has to do with science fiction, and Schmidt is simply human. There's no melodrama; there's no device, It's just about a human being. — Jack Nicholson

Teenagers all think their life is a movie. If you break up with someone or you have a fight, you walk around with movie scores playing in your head. You sort of see yourself suffering as you're suffering. There's a lot of melodrama attached to the real events of your life. — Kenneth Lonergan

Well, hope for your thrilling career - but remember that if there is to be drama in your life somebody must pay the piper in the coin of suffering. If not you - then someone else. — L.M. Montgomery

[H]istory is a melodrama on the theme of parasitism, characterized by scenes that are exciting or dull, as the case may be, and many a sudden stagetrick. — Max Nordau

In this context of achievement-and-death, artist who make Happenings are living out the purest melodrama. Their activity embodies the myth of nonsuccess, for Happenings cannot be sold and taken home; they can only be supported ... — Allan Kaprow

Ma was out back, head in hands, weaving in and out of her heaped-up crap. It was both melodramatic and not. I mean, when Ma feels something deeply, that's what she does: melodrama. Which makes it, I guess, not melodrama? — George Saunders

I thought that jealousy was an idea. It isn't. It's a pain. But I didn't feel as they do in a Broadway melodrama. I didn't want to kill anybody. I just wanted to die. — Floyd Dell

I think that melodrama is a safe way of suffering, because your suffering is fake. That's why I like melodrama. — Luis Negron

Kenney knows two essential truths about melodrama: First that it is most powerful when combined with irony and understatement; and second that it is a salient feature of modern life. — Stefan Kanfer

I barely watch TV apart from the news. Most of it is rubbish. There's all this reality nonsense and dross. I think there's a market for a well-produced, well-written melodrama like 'Dallas.' It's pure entertainment. — Larry Hagman