Personae Dramatis Quotes & Sayings

For the fiction students I teach, one of the most common mistakes is to start in the wrong place. Often the actual story doesn't begin until about a third of the way into their narratives. They start off instead with excessive scene-setting, metaphysical speculation, introducing nonessential dramatis personae, throat-clearing, etc. — Darin Strauss

But in our age of emptiness, tragedies are relatively rare. Or if they are written, the tragic aspect is the very fact that human life is so empty, as in Eugene O'Neill's drama, The Iceman Cometh. This play is set in a saloon, and its dramatis personae - alcoholics, prostitutes, and, as the chief character, a man who in the course of the play goes psychotic - can dimly recall the periods in their lives when they did believe in something. It is this echo of human dignity in a great void of emptiness that gives this drama the power to elicit the emotions of pity and terror of classical tragedy. — Rollo May

This piece of earth I billet grows small. Bullets of time dart past, dropping shards of opportunity at my feet. And until the rift that surrounds my decaying body clamps shut - swallows me up like so many remains - I army on, simultaneously ignoring and saving my comrades in the hole.
Such is a writer's life. — Chila Woychik

The few times I've tried to write original screenplays, it's a difficult process because I just don't feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel. — Tom Perrotta

The hunt for spouses is an activity on a par with fox-hunting or hawking, though the weapons and dramatis personae differ. Just as grizzled old men know the habits of hares and quail, so do elegant society gossips know every titbit about the year's eligible men and women. — Marie Brennan

Literature is like a subtle concoction of laboriously collected peripherals called words, intellect,thoughts,imagination,creativity and aestheticism brewed together to form a resplendent work of art. — Shilpa Sandesh

I'm not sorry it happened," she told him.
Doran turned to meet her eyes, shaking his head as he took her face in his palm. "Me neither," he said. "I'm sorry how it happened. — Melissa Landers

What people consider precious is different for everybody. — Ai Yazawa

I love looking completely different and that my fans won't always know what I'm going to do. — Jessie J.

Freud becomes one of the dramatis personae, in fact, as discoverer of the great and beautiful modern myth of psychoanalysis. By myth, I mean a poetic, dramatic expression of a hidden truth; and in placing this emphasis, I do not intend to put into question the scientific validity of psychoanalysis. — D.M. Thomas

Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand. — George Eliot

What can I do? She's here to help Kale."
"Sure she is. And I'm Ke$ha. — Jus Accardo

The thought, both recognized and yet ignored in the earlier chaos, surged through his mind. — Hope Ann

The stock market really isn't a gamble, as long as you pick good companies that you think will do well, and not just because of the stock price. — Peter Lynch

The gold-seekers began to work out what the main characters were like. They sketched out dramatis personae such as:

UGOLIN: A grand master of the Fascist Order (bass)
ALFONSINA: His daughter (coloratura soprano)
COMRADE MITIN: A Soviet inventor (baritone)
SFORZA: A fascist prince (tenor)
GAVRILA: A Soviet Young Communist (mezzo-soprano dressed as a man)
NINA: A Young Communist and daughter of a priest (lyric soprano) — Ilya Ilf

Each waking day is a stage dominated for good or ill, comedy, farce, or tragedy, by a dramatis personae, the 'self', and so it will be until the curtain drops. — Charles Scott Sherrington