Melodrama Quotes

“What you know is not always important.”
― Walter Tevis , The Queen's Gambit

“It is the custom on the stage: in all good, murderous melodramas: to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon. The hero sinks upon his straw bed, weighed down by fetters and misfortunes; and, in the next scene, his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience with a comic song. We behold, with throbbing bosoms, the heroine in the grasp of a proud and ruthless baron: her virtue and her life alike in danger; drawing forth a dagger to preserve the one at the cost of the other; and, just as our expectations are wrought up to the highest pitch, a whistle is heard: and we are straightway transported to the great hall of the castle: where a grey-headed seneschal sings a funny chorus with a funnier body of vassals, who are free of all sorts of places from church vaults to palaces, and roam about in company, carolling perpetually.

Such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would seem at first sight. The transitions in real life from well-spread boards to death-beds, and from mourning weeds to holiday garments, are not a whit less startling; only, there, we are busy actors, instead of passive lookers-on; which makes a vast difference. The actors in the mimic life of the theatre, are blind to violent transitions and abrupt impulses of passion or feeling, which, presented before the eyes of mere spectators, are at once condemned as outrageous and preposterous.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“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 Showwalter

“Melodramas of moral courage provide satisfaction through the comforting fantasy that our own character would hold steady under the most extreme pressure of dreadful events. [But we must face] the painful awareness that in all likelyhood one's own character would not have stood firm.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“You have more zeal than good taste, Martín. The disease afflicting you has a name, and that is Grand Guignol: it does to drama what syphilis does to your privates. Getting it might be pleasurable, but from then on it's all downhill.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“You said just now, "Don't be so ashamed of yourself, because that's the root of your trouble"––with those words, you seem to have reached right into my innermost soul. What I mean is, when I visit people, I always feel that I'm really the lowest of the low, that everybody takes me for a buffoon, so I say to myself, why shouldn't I act the fool, I'm not afraid of what any of you might think, because every single one of you is even worse than me. That's why I'm a buffoon, I'm a buffoon born of shame, great starets, of shame. It's anxiety pure and simple that makes me so unruly.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Living alone, with no one to consult or talk to, one might easily become melodramatic, and imagine things which had no foundation on fact.”
― Agatha Christie, Murder Is Easy

“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, Emily of New Moon

“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 Showwalter

“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, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

“[...] life had once again, perversely, refused to remain life-sized. It had turned melodramatic: and that embarrassed him.”
― Salman Rushdie

“Start talking in plain English so I can understand what you’re blabbing about, or I might misinterpret one of your little monologues as a confession.”
― Tony Del Degan, The Recognition

“She wants the Recognition… Damn all of you and your Recognition!”
― Tony Del Degan, The Recognition

“And who with any theatrical sense doesn’t like a little crazy?”
― Sol Luckman, Cali the Destroyer

“Some real kings are drama queens.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“You have said that if I declared my innocence you would believe me,” she exclaimed, lifting her head as I entered. “See here,” and laying her cheek against the pallid brow of her dead benefactor, she kissed the clay-cold lips softly, wildly, agonisedly, then, leaping to her feet, cried, in a subdued but thrilling tone: “Could I do that if I were guilty? Would not the breath freeze on my lips, the blood congeal in my veins, and my heart faint at this contact?”
― Anna Katharine Green, The Leavenworth Case

“The sound of her mother’s voice will break the glasshouse she has built around herself, a space devoid (of melodrama, of madness) ~ she’d rather go about doing her yogic routines.”
― Sindhu Rajasekaran, So I Let It Be

“1948: The Best Years of Our Lives. The characters in the film have retained a candour towards - and naive faith in - their feelings which we no longer possess. Our feelings, which we delightfully term emotions in order to salvage the fiction of an emotional life, are not affects any more, merely a psychological affectation, having lost all credence in our eyes. Or, alternatively, they are conversion emotions, betraying the melodrama going on in the body rather than the nuances of the soul. We do not even have this candour in our relations to our dreams, where we grapple with their interpretation, their splitting, their ironic reflexes. But the worst thing is that not just life, but cinema too, seems to have lost all simplicity since that period. But the worst thing is that not just life, but cinema too, seems to have lost all simplicity since that period. It knows only how to parody itself affectedly, and has veered towards psychodrama or visual melodrama. Retrospectively, these were then, also, the 'Best Years' of cinema.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“Take me not for a dullard, My Lord. She has no baggage.”
― Tony Del Degan, The Recognition

“My God, he is poisoned! See the froth on his lips!”
― Tony Del Degan, The Recognition

“Who’s the crow that plays dove in our roost?”
― Tony Del Degan

“It is fallen from its tree, and can never return to its branch; this is like you - fallen from your branch.”
― Tony Del Degan, The Recognition

“I am no fruit, My Lord.”
― Tony Del Degan, The Recognition

“No, my love. I would take sweet respite from my duties to scent burning flesh on the wind. Come, my subjects!”
― Tony Del Degan, The Recognition

“The Man of A Thousand Faces… I can see each one in this shard.”
― Tony Del Degan, The Recognition

“He broke away and hurried off. All that he had said had been spoken in a voice so low that only Sir Simon could have heard him. Yet the intensity in his voice had been terrific. Sir Simon felt as if an iron door had been suddenly flung open and had let out a red-hot blast from a furnace.”
― Robert Smythe Hichens, The Paradine Case

“The tone we want to avoid is melodrama.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde

“There was another flash outside, followed after a while by a clap of thunder. It was almost as if the weather was mocking our melodrama.”
― Yukito Ayatsuji, The Mill House Murders

“I feel like the perpetually rescued maiden in the old-fashioned novels or the moving pictures,” she laughed, straightening her hair. “First you save me from Roan Shively at the muzzle of a geological hammer, and now you catch me in my fall from a misses’-and-children’s-size cliff. Pretty soon, at this rate, the small boys at the back of the theater gallery will begin to clap every time the film shows you appearing on the horizon when I am in any predicament…”
― Albert Payson Terhune, The Faith Of A Collie

“I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said”
― Kaylin Haught, In the Palm of Your Hand: A Poet's Portable Workshop