Says And Does Drama Quotes & Sayings

I'm sorry I left without telling you," she says. "I wasn't ready. I wanted it so much, and I wasn't ready for that. — Nina LaCour

In actual fact, however, the revolt of Ibsen and Shaw against the conventional nineteenth century drama could very well be described as a return to Shakespeare, as an attempt once again to present human beings in their historical and social setting and not, as playwrights since the Restoration had done, either as wholly private or as embodiments of the social manners of a tiny class. Shakespeare's plays, it is true, are not, in the Shavian sense, "dramas of thought," that is to say, not one of his characters is an intellectual: it is true, as Shaw says, that, when stripped of their wonderful diction, the philosophical and moral views expressed by his characters are commonplaces, but the number of people in any generation or society whose thoughts are not commonplace is very small indeed. On the other hand, there is hardly one of his plays which does not provide unending food for thought, if one cares to think about it. — W. H. Auden

First play I ever did was 'Footloose.' I played the part of Willard when I was 16. I think I wore my drama teacher's jeans and her belt - that's how small I was. I know a lot of Willard's back story from the musical that's not explored in the film. Like he's got this whole relationship with his mama, and he sings this song 'Mama Says.' — Miles Teller

As Buechner says, we are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our lives but reactors, to go where the world takes us, to drift with whatever current happens to be running the strongest. — John Eldredge

My biggest pet peeve is when a girl says, "I'm not into drama." Why are you even mentioning it?! That's dramatic in itself! — Chris D'Elia

You guys are so caught up in your polished images and your passive-aggressive comments that no one ever comes right out and says anything. Well, I'm going to. — Richelle Mead

Music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and has nothing to say. Never really having an expressive function, it is opposed to drama, which even in its most refined forms still bears a social message and can only be 'put over' on the basis of an immediate and profound affinity with the values and expectations of its audience. The theatre divides its public and divides itself. The Parisian opposition between right-bank and left-bank theatr, bourgeois theatre and avant-garde theatre, is inextricably aesthetic and political. — Pierre Bourdieu

Are we making a bomb?"
"This is a trust exercise, like in drama," she says.
"Are we making a bomb as a trust exercise? — Joe Dunthorne

You wanted something to happen, right? " Rick says. "For all of this to be leading up to something? Closure," Rick says, pointing at the manila envelope. "That is definitely one way to have closure."
"I didn't say I wanted closure. Drama. I said I wanted drama."
"What do you think drama is, Murray?"
"How about something more open-ended?"
"Oh sure, that can be arranged, too," Rick says. "But even open-ended stories have to end at some point, right? Open endings, after all, are still endings. — Charles Yu

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

Reading private correspondence is in poor taste, Lord Ackerly."
"Unless it is terribly interesting," Eleanor says, "which Jessamin's letters are not. Mine, however, are lurid tales of my near-death experience and subsequent sequestering against my will in the home of the mysterious and brooding Lord Ackerly. I fear I may have given you a tragic past and a deadly secret or two."
"Are we staying in a decaying Gothic abbey?" I ask.
"Naturally. When I'm finished, there won't be a person in all the city who isn't writhing with jealousy over the heart-pounding drama of my life." She pauses, tapping her pen thoughtfully against her chin. "I don't suppose you have a cousin? I could very much use a romantic foil."
Finn shakes his head. "Sorry to disappoint."
"Alas. As long as I'm not the friend who meets a tragic end that brings you two together forever through shared grief." Her line meets dead silence, and a sly grin splits her face. "Oh wait, I nearly was. — Kiersten White

Lilly says I have an overactive imagination and a pathological need to invent drama in my life. — Meg Cabot

Freaky kids like us can't ever be normal- Tyler says smugly- Our generation is some new kind of "evolutionary development", my shrink says- "Normal" is just "average", not cool. My latest diagnosis is "A.P.M", Acute Premature Melancholia", usually an affliction of late middle age, they think is genetic since Ty Senoir has had it all his life, too.
You look if you might be A.P.M, too, Sky: that kind of pissed-off mopey look in your face like you swallowed something really gross and can't spit it out. — Joyce Carol Oates

Great drama, drama that may reach the alchemical level, must have dimension and its relevance will take care of itself. Writing about AIDS rather than the cocktail set, or possibly the fairy kingdom, will not guarantee importance ... The old comment that all periods of time are at an equal distance from eternity says much, and pondering on it will lead to alchemical theatre while relevance becomes old hat. — Robertson Davies

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

My companions for the afternoon were affable, welcoming middle-aged men in their late thirties and early forties who simply had no conception of the import of the afternoon for the rest of us. To them it was an afternoon out, a fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon; if I were to meet them again, they would, I think, be unable to recall the score that afternoon, or the scorer (at half-time they talked office politics), and in a way I envied them their indifference. Perhaps there is an argument that says Cup Final tickets are wasted on the fans, in the way that youth is wasted on the young; these men, who knew just enough about football to get them through the afternoon, actively enjoyed the occasion, its drama and its noise and its momentum, whereas I hated every minute of it, as I hated every Cup Final involving Arsenal. — Nick Hornby

He turns to the painting. "I fear Mark was right."
"Who is Mark?"
"A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer."
Gregory says, "Did you not know? — Hilary Mantel

The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map. — Fern Schumer Chapman

He promised me Berlin," Mum says. "It will kill him if we do not arrive."
"It'd take more than that to kill my Roy. Your lot didn't manage it, did they?"
"But what would happen if the brakes fail, Nell?" Mum dabs at her damp forehead with the hem of her cardigan. "Oh, I do hope Roy can take me home."
"He won't."
"Oh, Nell, can you not let me dream?"
"If hopes and dreams were big ice-creams, the world would be right sticky. Now come on, Bridge. Pull yourself together. Jesus wept, look at the state of you. You're as much use as a knitted knife. — Joanna Campbell

You look exhausted," Logan says, his eyes raking over me. "Why don't you try and catch some sleep."
"All your nocturnal activities must be taking a toll," Haydn mutters not too discreetly under his breath.
"The same could be said for you," I retort, in no mood to ignore his renewed mean streak.
"That's rich coming from you."
"Haydn." How Logan can manage to convey such potent meaning with one word is sheer talent. And I'm eternally grateful, because it shuts Haydn up. — Siobhan Davis

In order to dream so far, is it enough to read? Isn't it necessary to write? Write as in our schoolboy past, in those days when, as Bonnoure says, the letters wrote themselves one by one, either in their gibbosity or else in their pretentious elegance? In those days, spelling was a drama, our drama of culture at work in the interior of a word. — Gaston Bachelard

It is also true that memory sometimes comes to him as a voice. It is a voice that speaks inside him, and it is not necessarily his own. It speaks to him in the way a voice might tell stories to a child, and yet at times this voice makes fun of him, or calls him to attention, or curses him in no uncertain terms. At times it willfully distorts the story it is telling him, changing the facts to suit its whims, catering to the interests of drama rather than truth. Then he must speak to it in his own voice and tell it to stop, thus returning it to the silence it came from. At other times it sings to him. At still other times it whispers. And then there are the times it merely hums, or babbles, or cries out in pain. And even when it says nothing, he knows it is still there, and in the silence of this voice that says nothing, he waits for it to speak. — Paul Auster

So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I'll think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don't care. I just like solid entertainment. — Ray Bradbury

It's terrific, Clare," Henry says, and we stare at each other, and I think, "Don't leave me. — Audrey Niffenegger

It's going to be okay. That's what everyone says when they really have no idea how it's going to be. — Avery Sawyer

Thus the terrible insurrection was crushed. Tantia Topee, betrayed by his lieutenant Man-Singh, and condemned to death, was executed on the 15th of April, at Sipfee. This rebel, "this truly remarkable actor in the great drama of the Indian insurrection," says M. de Valbezen, "and one who gave proofs of a political genius full of resources and daring," died courageously on the scaffold. This — Jules Verne

Ares said you lot got important business ... ." "Ares is wise," Sevro says dismissively. "And a drama queen," Victra adds. — Pierce Brown

Here we go then," Dad says. "Motoring towards our dreams, Bridge."
"You shouldn't follow dreams," Grandma announces.
"Why?" I ask her.
"Because it's a road paved with disappointments, that's why. People should get on with what they've blinking well got at home."
"You can't tell people what their dreams are meant to be."
"I can. But they never listen, do they? — Joanna Campbell

Some playwrights are obvious influences on younger writers. Arthur Miller (realistic, politically engaged dramas) and Christopher Durang (satirical dark comedies) are examples. But August stands apart, ... He has his special way of seeing things. I remember he and I were at one of those fancy benefits the Rep has. The gay men's chorus was singing, and I was very proud to have brought them into a Rep event. And August says, 'You know, I don't see any black people up there.' That was his focus the lives of black people. — Daniel J. Sullivan

It's like a pistol in a stage play: when someone waves a pistol during the first act, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone will be shot with it before the curtain falls. That's the law of drama. The law that says no pistol must appear if no one's going to fire it. — Herman Koch

One thing more, Leon. You say that life is meaningless, but I believe it's life that's sacred. I talk about art and sex because they're the most intense life experiences I know, so I feel they must be sacred too. They let us experience the values we've chosen for our lives in one exquisite not of pleasure exactly but of oneness with all of existence and with our own personal relationship to it. Art says: "This is Life." Sex says: "This is Living. — Alexandra York

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

Another tug and a yank at my chestnut curls and she snarls at me, "You are so much like her."
This is something my mother often says and never explains. Though it is a great mystery to me it is also a blessing, for she always hurries from the room after saying it. — Gwenn Wright

Alex!" Brittany yells my name from the front of the gallery.
I'm still smoking and trying to forget that she brought me here because I'm her dirty little secret. I don't want to be a fucking secret anymore.
My pseudo-girlfriend crosses the street. Her designer shoes click on the pavement, reminding me she's a class above. She eyes Mandy and me, the two blue collars, smoking together.
"Mandy here was about to show me her tattoos," I tell Brittany to piss her off.
"I'll bet she was. Were you going to show her yours, too?" She eyes me accusingly.
"I'm not into drama," Mandy says. She throws down her cigarette and smashes it with the tip of her gym shoe. "Good luck, you two. God knows you need it. — Simone Elkeles