No Drama In Life Quotes & Sayings

She did it, though she hated opera. She hated everything about it. The overblown sense of drama. The violence and lewdness. No one had ever died of heartbreak in Reverie. Betrayal never led to murder. Those things didn't happen anymore. They had the Realms now. They could experience anything without taking risks. Now, life was Better than Real. — Veronica Rossi

I sleep for an entire day. And when I wake up I'm a new person. I'm empty. I've cried out everything I had in me. I'm an empty shell waiting to be filled with what comes next. Or I'm just being a total drama queen. I'm not empty. I'm still a person. I cried over a bad thing that happened in my life, but I probably shouldn't have. Compared to Mom's crisis, mine was small. Compared to a thousand other girls' around the world, mine is insignificant. It wasn't bad. Not compared to everyone else. It was just a couple seconds. It wasn't years. It wasn't months, like Mom. It wasn't a family member. Wasn't someone I see anymore. It didn't even hurt. There was no blood. It wasn't bad. Not compared to others'. So I should stop crying. — Sara Wolf

I'm overweight, despise change, and rarely, if ever, initiate anything. Unlike my friends, I've had no drama in my life which might qualify as box office material. If a little more drama came my way, however, I would probably need to purchase some courage in order to withstand it. Oh well, if a bit of change equals a bit of drama, I'm willing to risk it. — J.C. Patrick

It's strange, the lack of emotion, the absence of drama in reality. When things happen in real life, extraordinary things, there's no music, there's no dah-dah-daaahhs. There's no close-ups. No dramatic camera angles. Nothing happens. Nothing stops, the rest of the world goes on. — Kevin Brooks

An awful, heartbroken cackling from the reeds behind. A vortex formed. A hole in the water. Into this, tufts of feathers disappeared. Turning, Henry saw the fish inhale two ducklings. The others broke into the main river and were swept downstream, their mother with them. The thrashing fish threw water like a canoe blade. Gills flared as it wolfed them down. Henry looked about, frantic, but no one else was there to see, no one to assure him it was true. — Matthew Neill Null

I would like to believe that there is a resolution in the human tragedy and that order can be reimposed upon the earth in the same way it occurs in the fifth act of the Elizabethan drama that supposedly mirrors our lives. My experience has been otherwise. History seldom corrects itself in its own sequence, and when we mete out justice, we often do it in a fashion that perpetuates the evil of the transgressors and breathes new life into the descendants of Cain. I would like to believe the instincts of the mob can be exorcised from the species or genetically bred out of it. But there is no culture in the history of the world that has not lauded its warriors over its mystics. Sometimes in an idle moment, I try to recall the names of five slaves out of the whole sorry history of human bondage whose lives we celebrate. I have never had much success. — James Lee Burke

No Russians tell me they cheat to create drama. They say they long for heart-stopping, tear-off-your-clothes romance. I hear about a man who left an entire lilac tree on the doorstep of the woman he was courting. Given the grim realities of life in Russia, this fairy-tale passion might be sustainable only in extramarital affairs. — Pamela Druckerman

So, what's the story?"
"No story. Just a nightmare."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning, heavy compression lines in his cartilage, severe bruising on his kidneys, liver and lower intestines. Fracture marks on his collar bone, tibia, radius, humerus, scapular, femur and every single one of his ribs have been broken. Don't even get me started on the concussive damage to his skull and brain tissue. Twenty-three percent of this boys body is scared for life. And yet, every organ is functioning normally and his neurological activity is above average. He's eighteen years old and he weights about two bills but remove the scar tissue and he'd weigh about a buck-ten. All in all, I say he lived inside a hydraulic car press, went through the Napoleonic wars and was on board the Hindenburg when it went down in flame and yet he's okay ... this boy just refuses to die. — S.L.J. Shortt

Now I'd like someone to tell me there is no drama in real life! — Alexandre Dumas

Tea is an act complete in its simplicity.
When I drink tea, there is only me and the tea.
The rest of the world dissolves.
There are no worries about the future.
No dwelling on past mistakes.
Tea is simple: loose-leaf tea, hot pure water, a cup.
I inhale the scent, tiny delicate pieces of the tea floating above the cup.
I drink the tea, the essence of the leaves becoming a part of me.
I am informed by the tea, changed.
This is the act of life, in one pure moment, and in this act the truth of the world suddenly becomes revealed: all the complexity, pain, drama of life is a pretense, invented in our minds for no good purpose.
There is only the tea, and me, converging. — Thich Nhat Hanh

The more it changes, the more it's the same thing. But overall, things have changed. I say changed and not "changed for the better" because I am no fool. Fate is a total drama queen. The second you say things are better than they were, she'll come stumbling toward you on her six-inch heels, nasty-ass wig crooked and on sideways. You'll wonder exactly how she got all that makeup slathered onto her face. One nicotine-caked fake fingernail will point at you, and she will make sure that things are anything but better from there on out. So no, thank you. Things are different but not better and, in fact, could get much much worse, so fuck off, Fate! Is she gone? Whew. Things had changed at school and not in a bad way(crosses fingers and hope that doesn't count as pissing Fate off). — John Goode

There's an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists."
So God just leaves?"
No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering."
Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine: Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it."
But the sparrow still falls. — Mary Doria Russell

People have no limits either in love or in hatred. But is it their fault? They despise us because they are afraid, for we remind them that getting crippled or sick might happen to anyone; or, perhaps, the true reason of their hatred lies much deeper inside, stemming from the hidden ugliness of their own souls? — Igor Eliseev

And now, what does it all matter? It matters more than anything else in the world. The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made. — C.S. Lewis

From The Twelve Enlightenments
Observe your own body. It breathes. You breathe when you are asleep, when you are no longer conscious of your own ideas of self-identity. Who, then, is breathing? The collection of information that you mistakenly think it's you is not the main protagonist in this drama called the breath. In fact, you are not breathing; breath is naturally happening to you. You can purposely end your own life, but you cannot purposely keep your own life going. The expression, "My life" is actually an oxymoron, a result of ignorance and mistaken assumption. You don't posses life; life expresses itself through you. Your body is a flower that life let bloom, a phenomenon created by life. — Ilchi Lee

What emotion had filled the breast of Christ when he ordered away the man who was to betray him for thirty pieces of silver. Was it anger? or resentment? Or did these words arise from his love? If it was anger, then at this instant Christ excluded from salvation this man alone of all the men in the world; and then our Lord allowed one man to fall into eternal damnation. But it could not be so. Christ wanted to save even Judas. If not, he would have never made him one of his disciples. And yet why did Christ not stop him when he began to slip from the path of righteousness? This was a problem I had not understood even as a seminarian......If it is not blasphemous to say so, I have the feeling that Judas was no more than the unfortunate puppet for the glory of that drama which was the life and death of Christ. — Shusaku Endo

While he can interact with others who have no idea that anything is wrong, Ron lives without spontaneity, going through the motions, doing what he thinks people expect him to do, glad that he is able to at least appear normal throughout the day and maintain a job. He studied drama briefly while in college, and remains enamored of Shakespeare and literature, but an emerging self-consciousness eventually robbed him of his ability to act. Now he feels as if all of his life is an act - just an attempt to maintain the status quo.

Recalling literature he once loved, he sometimes pictures himself as Camus's Meursault, in The Stranger: an emotionless character who plods through life in a meaningless universe with apathy and indifference. He's tired of living
this way but terrified of death. — Daphne Simeon

You know, my young friend, I will be ninety years old next year, and life is still a constant surprise to me. We never know what will happen next, what we will see, and what important person will come into our life, or what important person we will lose. Life is change, constant change, and unless we are lucky enough to find comedy in it, change is nearly always a drama, if not a tragedy. But after everything, and even when the skies turn scarlet and threatening, I still believe that if we are lucky enough to be alive, we must give thanks for the miracle of every moment of every day, no matter how flawed. — Mark T. Sullivan

Such is the privilege of survival: to be allowed to fashion the means that fit our ends, to cobble together a narrative that reveals (as by the divine light of illumination) the predestined arc of our days. This is no small gift. With it we can neutralize all but the greatest losses, reduce even the greatest bastards to nothing more than bit actors in the drama of our lives, put on this earth for the sole purpose of forwarding our cause. Blessed are those who can believe their own stories. — Mark Slouka

My entire life has been one big, fat whopper of a lie, and my parents betrayed me in the worst possible way.
I don't care if they believed they were protecting me.
You don't lie to the people you profess to love, no matter how painful the truth is. — Siobhan Davis

I've heard that lawyers' children, on seeing their parents in court in the
heat of argument, get the wrong idea: they think opposing counsel to be the personal enemies of their parents, they suffer agonies, and are surprised to see them often go out arm-in-arm with their tormenters during the first recess. This was not true of Jem and me. We acquired no traumas from watching our father win or lose. I'm sorry that I can't provide any drama in this respect; if I did, it would not be true. We could tell, however, when debate became more acrimonious than professional, but this was from watching lawyers other than our father. I never heard Atticus raise his voice in my life, except to a deaf witness. — Harper Lee

For a while, the gay thing seemed like such a big deal. But now, I don't think it is. It's just a comedy-drama about people who live in the United States. It's a slice-of-life. I play a character-that's it. But I was well aware of the gay lifestyle before the show. I've been hit on in a really strong way by gay men who've tried to convert me, and a lot of my heroes are gay. William Burroughs, Lou Reed. Well, I guess Lou Reed is bi. The point is, it's 2002, gay life is no longer that shocking. — Gale Harold

Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was _books_ that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, 'Don't get lost in the drama of life,' and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus. — Mary Rose O'Reilley

I think that it's important for every single person, no matter what they do in life, to participate in the well-being of humanity and the planet. Don't let a year go by knowing you didn't make an effort to do something - no matter how small - outside your own problems and drama. — Salma Hayek

The dance is the most universal of the arts, since, as Goethe justly said, it could destroy all the fine arts. It is an expression of all the emotions of the spirit, from the lowest to the highest. It accompanies and stimulates all the processes of life, from hunting and farming to war and fertility, from love to death. It enables, in turn other arts to come into being: music, song, drama. Despite all their riches, the dance is no formless complex, but a simple unity. — Gerard Van Der Leeuw

I was lined up to do this honors degree course in biology, of all things, for no better reason than I got high marks in it. I decided I didn't want to be removing worms' hearts for the rest of my life in Northern Ontario. I thought I would try acting. So, I went to England to study drama. I got Shakespeared out. — Matt Frewer

Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour. — Jeanette Winterson

And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to enjoy. Anyhow there was no bitterness in her; none of that sense of moral virtue which is so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed practically everything. If you walked with her in Hyde Park now it was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd little drama she made up on the spur of the moment. — Virginia Woolf

He was amazed to find that the Karmapa, an eminent spiritual leader known the world over, treated him as though his visit were one of the most important things that had ever happened to the Karmapa in his life. This treatment did not manifest through grandiose gestures or ceremony, but rather through the simplicity and completeness of the Karmapa's presence, which offered my friend an experience of being completely loved. When I heard this story, I thought about how many conversations I have had during which my attention was halfhearted. I might be thinking about the next thing I had to do or the next person I had to talk to. How unfair that lack of attention now seems! The simple act of being completely present to another person is truly an act of love - no drama is required. — Sharon Salzberg

Many things happen in life. There are joyous days and times of suffering. Sometimes unpleasant things occur. But that's what makes life so interesting. The dramas we encounter are part and parcel of being human. If we experienced no change or drama in our lives, if nothing unexpected ever happened, we would merely be like automatons, our lives unbearably monotonous and dull. Therefore, please develop a strong self so that you can enact the drama of your life with confidence and poise in the face of whatever vicissitudes you may encounter. — Daisaku Ikeda

I think that no matter how much you don't like yourself or the drama of your life you can still find some comedy in it. — Tommy Lee Jones

The dictionary describes a selfish person as one who is 'concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself: seeking pleasure or well-being without regard for others.' May we add, a selfish person is often one who refers to 'I,' 'me,' and 'mine' rather than to 'we,' 'ours,' 'yours,' or 'theirs.' This person is anxious to be in the limelight, to be on center stage in life's little dramas. He or she may be a poor listener, or a conversation monopolizer. Selfishness is the great unknown sin. No selfish person ever thought himself to be selfish. — H. Burke Peterson

Real life' does not speak for itself. It has to be turned into words, stories, and plots. It is only when these are lifted out of the unstoppable flow that they hold our protracted attention. Where tragedy's concerned, there is no absolute reason why they have to be told in the form of drama, performed in a theatre. This is why Aristotle is right to insist that the poet's business is to make plots (mythoi) not verses. That's what we need from tragedy, he says: good plots. — Adrian Poole

Many a night that summer she left Dr. Archie's office with a desire to run and run about those quiet streets until she wore out her shoes, or wore out the streets themselves; when her chest ached and it seemed as if her heart were spreading all over the desert. When she went home, it was not to go to sleep. She used to drag her mattress beside her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window
or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that it was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation. It was on such nights that Thea Kronborg learned the thing that old Dumas meant when he told the Romanticists that to make a drama he needed but one passion and four walls. — Willa Cather

Her tears fell abundantly
but her grief was so truly artless, that no dignity could have made it more respectable in Emma's eyes
and she listened to her and tried to console her with all her heart and understanding
really for the time convinced that Harriet was the superior creature of the two
and that to resemble her would be more for her own welfare and happiness than all that genius or intelligence could do.
It was rather too late in the day to set about being simple-minded and ignorant; but she left her with every previous resolution confirmed of being humble and discreet, and repressing imagination all the rest of her life. — Jane Austen

This is a massive world, I think, and in each centimeter of it, a different drama unfolds every second of the day. But we live on as if the next moment in our lives will be no different than the last. How foolish we all are. — Mahbod Seraji

Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed that we should be what we are. — Walter Lippmann

I gave you a few laughs and showed you a good time, but there was no future with me. So although it was fun while it lasted, you made up your mind to choose the stability and security a rich man can offer."
She shook her head. "No."
"No?"
"If you look in your heart, you know that's not true."
"So, what is it then, he went into a jealous rage and he threatened
you?"
"Yes."
"With your life?"
"No."
"Well then ... "
"With yours. — N. Lombardi Jr.

If you can reincarnate, what do you wanna be in your next life? I think I want to become a rock. A stone has no troubles and lives a simple life. The worst that could happen would be being stepped on, but that won't hurt. Am I right? What about you? What are you thinking? I've already thought it over for you. You'll become the wind. Because the wind is one of the world's cleanest things. Moreover, the wind can blow upon the rock, moving it. As it blows, the rock will eventually turn into sand. This way, the sand and wind can be together. Sand and wind are meant to be together. — Ah Ken

Novel-writing has in one respect an affinity to the drama - that time and distance are required to soften for use the harsher features that may be exhibited from real life; that it was almost impossible to bring forward events without touching on their causes; and that any tendency to political discussion, however liberal or applicable, was not to be tolerated in a sort of work which people took up with no other design than to be amused at the least possible expence of thought. — Charlotte Turner Smith

I care for you, darling, I love you,
the only reason I fucked L. is because you fucked
Z. and then I fucked R. and you fucked N.
and because you fucked N. I had to fuck
Y. But I think of you constantly, I feel you
here in my belly like a baby, love I'd call it,
no matter what happens I'd call it love, and so
you fucked C. and then before I could move
you fucked W., so I had to fuck D. But
I want you to know that I love you, I think of you
constantly, I don't think I've ever loved anybody
like I love you. — Charles Bukowski

Let's just say that drama became something very real to me that day, she said. It ceased to be theoretical, was no longer an internal structure in which she could hide and look out on the wold. In a sense, her work had jumped out of a bush and attacked her.

I said it seemed to me that at a certain point a lot of people felt that, not about work but about life itself. — Rachel Cusk

Meditation doesn't lead you to silence; meditation only creates the situation in which the silence happens. And this should be the criterion - that whenever silence happens laughter will come into your life. A vital celebration will happen all around. You will not become sad, you will not become depressed, you will not escape from the world. You will be here in this world, but taking the whole thing as a game, enjoying the whole thing as a beautiful game, a big drama, no longer serious about it. Seriousness is a disease. — Rajneesh

Listen to me you piece of shit, if you ever give the press information about me, my parents or even breathe a word about me to anyone ever again, I swear to god I will make it my mission to make your life a living hell. And, believe me I'll do it with a smile on my face the whole time. You're a worthless excuse for a Detective and everyone here knows it. You've screwed your way to the top and backstabbed Gena to get into your Captain's good books. Well look around you honey, you're a real star. No one stopped Gena or me taking you on. I've currently got you in a hold, where I could snap your neck if I wanted to, and not one person is stepping forward to help you. Yeah, you've really made it. - Stephanie Carovella to Sandra Barton — Nina D'Angelo

I don't want no drama in my life, even though we have a little bit, but no more letting people control you. That's drama, because then you become something that you're not. — Mary J. Blige

In order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuiseance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential. It may often happen, no doubt, that a drama may be written by somebody else which we like very little. But we should like it still less if the author came before the curtain every hour or so, and forced on us the whole trouble of inventing the next act. A man has control over many things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much hero that there would be no novel. — G.K. Chesterton

Every day try to help uplift physically, mentally, or spiritually suffering people, as you would help yourself
or your family. If, instead of living in the misery-making selfish way, you live according to the laws of God, then, no matter what small part you may be playing on the stage of life, you will know that you have been playing your part correctly, as directed by the Stage Manager of all our destinies. Your part, however small, is just as important as the biggest parts in contributing to the success of the Drama of Souls on the Stage of Life. Make a little money and be satisfied with it by living a simple life and expressing your ideals, rather than make lots of money and have worries without end. — Paramahansa Yogananda

Yet there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I did, although, in my everyday life, I had nowhere to go and no imaginable reason on earth why I should want to leave. The buses took to the interstate without me, the trains sped by. So I wandered the world through books. I went to Victorian England in the pages of 'Middlemarch' and 'A little Princess', and to Saint Petersburg before the fall of the tsar with 'Anna Karenina'. I went to Tara, and Manderley, and Thornfield Hall, all those great houses, with their high ceilings and high drama, as I read 'Gone with the Wind', 'Rebecca' and 'Jane Eyre'. — Anna Quindlen

The process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me, all writing is a process of discovery. We are looking for the meaning of life. No matter where you are, there are conflicts and dramas everywhere. It is the process of what it means to be a human being; how you react and are reacted upon, these inward and outer pressures. If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It's fatal for a fiction writer. — Nadine Gordimer

Looking outward to the blackness of space, sprinkled with the glory of a universe of lights, I saw majesty-but no welcome. Below was a welcoming planet. There, contained in the thin, moving, incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere is everything that is dear to you, all the human drama and comedy. That's where life is; that's were all the good stuff is. — Loren Acton

Every reiteration of the idea that _nothing matters_ debases the human spirit.
Every reiteration of the idea that there is no drama in modern life, there is only dramatization, that there is no tragedy, there is only unexplained misfortune, debases us. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams
like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams. — David Mamet

God makes no mistakes. In all our trials and dramas there are lessons. Life is not a playground but a classroom. Our journey through life provides the course work and the tests needed for our education and development. — Susan L. Taylor

No matter how old I get, the race remains one of life's most rewarding experiences. My times become slower and slower, but the experience of the race is unchanged: each race a drama, each race a challenge, each race stretching me in one way or another, and each race telling me more about myself and others. — George A. Sheehan

Alannah?" He held her limp body waiting for a response. "Don't do this." He put his hand over the other cut whispering his words and healing it as well. "Alannah?" His voice begged, as he held her face in his hand Still no response. He looked at the ground she had laid on realizing that she had lost a lot of blood. Then from the corner of his eye he saw the rise and fall of her chest and let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. She still lives. — B.C. Morin

And what nags me about this is that the source of my anxiety was exactly what Kierkegaard says the source of anxiety is, and what he praised in direct proportion to the volume any person possesses: possibility. The awareness that life is a series of choices any one of which could be either aggrandizing or disastrous. That this happens to be true I have no trouble signing on to. Any who has lived past the age of ten knows that even piddling actions can wind up having big consequences, and that even when you are super-conscious of your behaviors you can't know how things are going to turn out in the short- or the long-run. That's the drama of it all. On the one hand, your very existence means you can and will change things in your life and others. On the other hand, you aren't God, so everything is always going to be drenched in uncertainty and doubt. — Daniel Smith

With a book - presuming it's a good book - you can depend upon an outcome that adheres to the necessities of drama. The question will be answered. It has to be. The answer may not be happy; we can't guarantee a comedy. Sometimes tragedy strikes. But there will be a conclusion. Of that we can be sure. That's the whole point of a book. But in real life, there is no guarantee that any question will ever be answered. Real life is messy because we don't know where it's going to go. — Garth Stein

It was a relief to inhabit someone else's life for a while, to get her personal issues for a brief respite. In a play, she knew exactly how all her character's problems would be resolved. No matter how the cast performed, the end turned out the same. No questions, no worries, no unknowns. — Alexandra Robbins

36. Man, thou hast been a citizen in this great state [the world]: what difference does it make to thee whether for five years [or three]? for that which is conformable to the laws is just for all. Where is the hardship then, if no tyrant nor yet an unjust judge sends thee away from the state, but nature who brought thee into it? the same as if a praetor who has employed an actor dismisses him from the stage. "But I have not finished the five acts, but only three of them." - Thou sayest well, but in life the three acts are the whole drama; for what shall be a complete drama is determined by him who was once the cause of its composition, and now of its dissolution: but thou art the cause of neither. Depart then satisfied, for he also who releases thee is satisfied — Marcus Aurelius