Quotes about drama (357 quotes, page 4)

“I just revelled in that High Mass at Beuron Abbey on All Saints' Day.. Of course it's a spectacle, but that's just what makes sense, the very same sense as monasticism in general…ritual as the reflection of glory. How marvellously impersonal it is - the strict anonymity of the monks, even more impressive when they raise their hoods. They are just figures and voices. What an achievement to divest oneself of everything private, individual, to enact this holy drama day after day, indifferent to one's personal mood, representing all of us simply as mouth of the Church.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Letters 1951-59.

Mood , Sense , Personality , Indifference

“I have been vitally aware of the Law of Opposites, and this awareness has kept me reasonably serene… the drama of life… the play of truth. the quarrel of fools and frauds, male and female, the classic and the romantic, the disciplined and the free… the comic and the tragic contrasting of the opposites in all areas of possibility and on and on and on.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

Obituaries (1979)

Life , Truth , Law , Fools

“I find it hard living on my own, but I imagine I would find it difficult not living on my own. Perhaps I could still change my mind. That's everyone's drama. We all make different compromises. And, no, I don't regret not having children. Given my painting, children could have suffered. A mother must make her children come first: young children are helpless. Well, paintings are objects but they're also helpless.”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

In 1958 (three years after breaking up with Greenberg, Frankenthaler married Robert Motherwell; their marriage ended in 1971.
1970s - 1980s, interview with Deborah Salomon in 'New York Times', 1989

Children , Imagination , Suffering , Change

“On 30 Rock and Studio 60 and the Sunset Strip airing in the same year: "We’ll probably end up doing a terrible crossover, where the Matthew Perry character on the drama rapes my character on the comedy—and then the ‘Law & Order’ team solves the crime."”

Tina Fey (1970) American comedian, writer, producer and actress

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/24/060424ta_talk_friend
On 30 Rock

Law

“As a child, everyone dreams of finding treasure. There’s romance and drama. But as an adult most people aren’t going to spend their lives trying to find it.”

E. Lee Spence (1947) German anthropologist, photographer, archaeologist, historian, photojournalist and academic

Diving Into Sunken-Treasure Investing http://www.cnbc.com/id/39342234, CNBC Special Report by Shelly K. Scwartz, Published: October 18, 2010.

People , Dreams

“Time takes her toll and the memory fades
but his glory is broken, in the magic that he made.
Reality is ruined; it's the freeing from the fear
The drama is distorted, to what they want to hear
Swimming in their sorrow, in the twisting of a tear
As they wait for a new thrill parade.”

Phil Ochs (1940–1976) American protest singer and songwriter

"Crucifixion"
Pleasures of the Harbor (1967)

Fear , Reality , Tear , Memory

“This mechanical element, which one is sorry to see disappear from the screen, and which one is impatient to see again, is discreet; it appears only at intervals, and far off, like a spotlight that flashes on in a long, intermittent, harrowing drama of totally uncompromising realism. The plastic event is non-the less there and seems to me be laden with consequences both in itself and for the future.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

on the filming of Abel Gance's La Roue, 1922
Quote in: Fernand Léger - The Later Years -, catalogue edited by Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 21
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1920's

Appearance , Future

“This is real human drama, we're not creating some amusement park ride for the summer. Even though the movie is really exciting to watch, it's got a real pathos behind it.”

John C. Reilly (1965) American actor

Summer

“Everything written is as good as it is dramatic. It need not declare itself in form, but it is drama or nothing.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Preface to A Way Out : A One-act Play (1929)
General sources
Context: Everything written is as good as it is dramatic. It need not declare itself in form, but it is drama or nothing. A least lyric alone may have a hard time, but it can make a beginning, and lyric will be piled on lyric till all are easily heard as sung or spoken by a person in a scene — in character, in a setting. By whom, where and when is the question.

“As the story unfolds many things appear: extraordinary sacrifice and teamwork, often alongside an atmosphere of mistrust, uncertainty, media scrutiny, and politics. There is a temptation to seek a single hero or culprit- a person, group, or policy- that emerges as the decisive factor. This makes for better intrigue, but it's a false drama.”

Stanley A. McChrystal (1954) American general

Source: My Share Of The Task (2013), p. 278
Context: As the story unfolds many things appear: extraordinary sacrifice and teamwork, often alongside an atmosphere of mistrust, uncertainty, media scrutiny, and politics. There is a temptation to seek a single hero or culprit- a person, group, or policy- that emerges as the decisive factor. This makes for better intrigue, but it's a false drama. To do so is to oversimplify the war, the players, and Afghanistan itself. Because despite their relevance as contributing factors, I found no single personality, decision, relationship, or event that determined the outcome or even dominated the direction of events. Afghanistan did that. Only Afghanistan, with her deep scars and opaque complexity, emerged as the essential reality and dominant character. On her brutal terrain, and in the minds of her people, the struggle was to be waged and decided. No outcome was preordained, but nothing would come easily. Few things of value do.

Decision , Appearance , Personality , Falseness

“The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

The World's Last Night (1952)
Context: The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.

World

“Great drama, drama that may reach the alchemical level, must have dimension and its relevance will take care of itself.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Alchemy in the Theatre (1994).
Context: 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.

“Now it is symptomatic of our rusty-beer-can type of sanity that our culture produces very few magical objects. Jewelry is slick and uninteresting. Architecture is almost totally bereft of exuberance, obsessed with erecting glass boxes. Children's books are written by serious ladies with three names and no imagination, and as for comics, have you ever looked at the furniture in Dagwood's home? The potentially magical ceremonies of the Catholic Church are either gabbled away at top speed, or rationalized with the aid of a commentator. Drama or ritual in everyday behavior is considered affectation and bad form, and manners have become indistinguishable from manerisms—where they exist at all. We produce nothing comparable to the great Oriental carpets, Persian glass, tiles, and illuminated books, Arabian leatherwork, Spanish marquetry, Hindu textiles, Chinese porcelain and embroidery, Japanese lacquer and brocade, French tapestries, or Inca jewelry. (Though, incidentally, there are certain rather small electronic devices that come unwittingly close to fine jewels.)
The reason is not just that we are too much in a hurry and have no sense of the present; not just that we cannot afford the type of labor that such things would now involve, nor just that we prefer money to materials. The reason is that we have scrubbed the world clean of magic. We have lost even the vision of paradise, so that our artists and craftsmen can no longer discern its forms. This is the price that must be paid for attempting to control the world from the standpoint of an "I" for whom everything that can be experienced is a foreign object and a nothing-but.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 84-85

Money , Children , Books , World

“My privilege is to be spectator of my life drama, to be fully conscious of the tragi-comedy of my own destiny, and, more than that, to be in the secret of the tragi-comic itself, that is to say, to be unable to take my illusions seriously, to see myself, so to speak, from the theater on the stage, or to be like a man looking from beyond the tomb into existence. I feel myself forced to feign a particular interest in my individual part, while all the time I am living in the confidence of the poet who is playing with all these agents which seem so important, and knows all that they are ignorant of.”

Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881) Swiss philosopher and poet

8 November 1852
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries
Context: My privilege is to be spectator of my life drama, to be fully conscious of the tragi-comedy of my own destiny, and, more than that, to be in the secret of the tragi-comic itself, that is to say, to be unable to take my illusions seriously, to see myself, so to speak, from the theater on the stage, or to be like a man looking from beyond the tomb into existence. I feel myself forced to feign a particular interest in my individual part, while all the time I am living in the confidence of the poet who is playing with all these agents which seem so important, and knows all that they are ignorant of. It is a strange position, and one which becomes painful as soon as grief obliges me to betake myself once more to my own little rôle, binding me closely to it, and warning me that I am going too far in imagining myself, because of my conversations with the poet, dispensed from taking up again my modest part of valet in the piece. Shakespeare must have experienced this feeling often, and Hamlet, I think, must express it somewhere. It is a Doppelgängerei, quite German in character, and which explains the disgust with reality and the repugnance to public life, so common among the thinkers of Germany. There is, as it were, a degradation a gnostic fall, in thus folding one's wings and going back again into the vulgar shell of one's own individuality. Without grief, which is the string of this venturesome kite, man would soar too quickly and too high, and the chosen souls would be lost for the race, like balloons which, save for gravitation, would never return from the empyrean.

Life , Secret , Feeling , Confidence

“I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

Narration for Crash! (1971), a short film by Harley Cokeliss
Context: I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape.
We spend a substantial part of our lives in the motor car, and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in the 1970s, the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the 20th century reaches its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age; the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.

Cars , Thinking , Speed

“The process of consumption… is the final act in the economic drama”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1940s, Economic Analysis, 1941, p. 614 (rev. ed. 1948) as cited in: Andrew McMeekin (2002) Innovation by Demand. p. 131

“In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Introduction
The Nature of the Physical World (1928)
Context: In physics we have outgrown archer and apple-pie definitions of the fundamental symbols. To a request to explain what an electron really is supposed to be we can only answer, "It is part of the A B C of physics".
The external world of physics has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions. Later perhaps we may inquire whether in our zeal to cut out all that is unreal we may not have used the knife too ruthlessly. Perhaps, indeed, reality is a child which cannot survive without its nurse illusion. But if so, that is of little concern to the scientist, who has good and sufficient reasons for pursuing his investigations in the world of shadows and is content to leave to the philosopher the determination of its exact status in regard to reality. In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it. Then comes the alchemist Mind who transmutes the symbols. The sparsely spread nuclei of electric force become a tangible solid; their restless agitation becomes the warmth of summer; the octave of aethereal vibrations becomes a gorgeous rainbow. Nor does the alchemy stop here. In the transmuted world new significances arise which are scarcely to be traced in the world of symbols; so that it becomes a world of beauty and purpose — and, alas, suffering and evil.
The frank realisation that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.

Life , World

“Be patient. Our Playwright may show
In some fifth act what this wild Drama means.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate

The Play, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Let today be the day … You shake off your self-defeating drama and embrace your innate ability to recover and achieve.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 86
Context: How would your life be different if … You stopped validating your victim mentality? Let today be the day … You shake off your self-defeating drama and embrace your innate ability to recover and achieve.

“The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Letter to Harold Adam Innis (14 March 1951), published in Essential McLuhan (1995), edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, p. 74
1950s

Love

“Everyone sees drama from his own perspective.”

Jean-Marie Le Pen (1928) French right-wing and nationalist politician

As quoted in The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 21 (2002) by the Institute for Historical Review, p. 2
Context: Everyone sees drama from his own perspective. My father was killed by a German mine, while I lost other relatives in Allied bombing attacks. The Second World War claimed tens of millions of victims. For some the most terrible aspect of it was the deportations, while for others it was the leveling bombings or the mass deaths by starvation and cold.

“You are, my Lord, but just entering into the world; I am going out of it. I have played long enough to be heartily tired of the drama.”

Edmund Burke book A Vindication of Natural Society

A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)
Context: You are, my Lord, but just entering into the world; I am going out of it. I have played long enough to be heartily tired of the drama. Whether I have acted my part in it well or ill, posterity will judge with more candour than I, or than the present age, with our present passions, can possibly pretend to. For my part, I quit it without a sigh, and submit to the sovereign order without murmuring. The nearer we approach to the goal of life, the better we begin to understand the true value of our existence, and the real weight of our opinions. We set out much in love with both; but we leave much behind us as we advance. We first throw away the tales along with the rattles of our nurses; those of the priest keep their hold a little longer; those of our governors the longest of all. But the passions which prop these opinions are withdrawn one after another; and the cool light of reason, at the setting of our life, shows us what a false splendour played upon these objects during our more sanguine seasons. Happy, my Lord, if, instructed by my experience, and even by my errors, you come early to make such an estimate of things, as may give freedom and ease to your life. I am happy that such an estimate promises me comfort at my death.

World

“He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power.”

George Sand (1804–1876) French novelist and memoirist; pseudonym of Lucile Aurore Dupin

On Chopin's Preludes in Histoire de Ma Vie (1902-04), Vo. IV, p. 439
Context: It was there he composed these most beautiful of short pages which he modestly entitled the Preludes. They are masterpieces. Several bring to mind visions of deceased monks and the sound of funeral chants; others are melancholy and fragrant; they came to him in times of sun and health, in the clamor of laughing children under he window, the faraway sound of guitars, birdsongs from the moist leaves, in the sight of the small pale roses coming in bloom on the snow. … Still others are of a mournful sadness, and while charming your ear, they break your heart. There is one that came to him through an evening of dismal rain — it casts the soul into a terrible dejection. Maurice and I had left him in good health one morning to go shopping in Palma for things we needed at out "encampment." The rain came in overflowing torrents. We made three leagues in six hours, only to return in the middle of a flood. We got back in absolute dark, shoeless, having been abandoned by our driver to cross unheard of perils. We hurried, knowing how our sick one would worry. Indeed he had, but now was as though congealed in a kind of quiet desperation, and, weeping, he was playing his wonderful Prelude. Seeing us come in, he got up with a cry, then said with a bewildered air and a strange tone, "Ah, I was sure that you were dead." When he recovered his spirits and saw the state we were in, he was ill, picturing the dangers we had been through, but he confessed to me that while waiting for us he had seen it all in a dream, and no longer distinguished the dream from reality, he became calm and drowsy while playing the piano, persuaded that he was dead himself. He saw himself drowned in a lake. Heavy drops of icy water fell in a regular rhythm on his breast, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops of water indeed falling in rhythm on the roof, he denied having heard it. He was even angry that I should intepret this in terms of imitative sounds. He protested with all his might — and he was right to — against the childishness of such aural imitations. His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky. … The gift of Chopin is [the expression of] the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power.

“The most momentous chapter in American history is the story of the making and ratifying of the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution has so long been rooted so deeply in American life — or American life rooted so deeply in it — that the drama of its origins is often overlooked.”

Carl Van Doren (1885–1950) American biographer

Preface
The Great Rehearsal (1948)
Context: The most momentous chapter in American history is the story of the making and ratifying of the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution has so long been rooted so deeply in American life — or American life rooted so deeply in it — that the drama of its origins is often overlooked. Even historical novelists, who hunt everywhere for memorable events to celebrate, have hardly touched the event without which there would have been a United States very different from the one that now exists; or might have been no United States at all.
The prevailing conceptions of those origins have varied with the times. In the early days of the Republic it was held, by devout friends of the Constitution, that its makers had received it somewhat as Moses received the Tables of the Law on Sinai. During the years of conflict which led to the Civil War the Constitution was regarded, by one party or the other, as the rule of order or the misrule of tyranny. In still later generations the Federal Convention of 1787 has been accused of evolving a scheme for the support of special economic interests, or even a conspiracy for depriving the majority of the people of their liberties. Opinion has swung back and forth, while the Constitution itself has grown into a strong yet flexible organism, generally, if now and then slowly, responsive to the national circumstances and necessities.

Life , History

“To become truly wild, we must not be sidetracked by the dramas of power-over, the seduction of addictions, or the thrill of control. We must go deeper.”

Starhawk (1951) American author, activist and Neopagan

The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess (1979)
Context: One of the great disservices a culture of domination has done to all of us is to confuse the erotic with domination and violence. The God is wild, but his is the wildness of connection, not of domination. Wildness is not the same as violence. Gentleness and tenderness do not translate into wimpiness. When men — or women, for that matter — begin to unleash what is untamed in us, we need to remember that the first images and impulses we encounter will often be the stereotyped paths of power we have learned in a culture of domination. To become truly wild, we must not be sidetracked by the dramas of power-over, the seduction of addictions, or the thrill of control. We must go deeper. <!-- p. 233

“So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you're all that, only you're pretending you're not. And it's perfectly OK to pretend you're not, to be perfectly convinced, because this is the whole notion of drama.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

The Nature of Consciousness; also published as What Is Reality? (1989)

God , Idea , Reality , Sense

“Turn Your Melodrama into a Mellow-Drama”

Richard Carlson (1961–2006) Author, psychotherapist and motivational speaker

Title of Lesson 60
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…and it’s all Small Stuff (1997)

“God is not an impersonal thing nor a static thing—not even just one person—but a dynamic pulsating activity, a life, a kind of drama, almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance … (The) pattern of this three-personal life is … the great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book IV, Chapter 4, "Good Infection"
Mere Christianity (1952)
Context: They [Christians] believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else. And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not an impersonal thing nor a static thing—not even just one person—but a dynamic pulsating activity, a life, a kind of drama, almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance … (The) pattern of this three-personal life is … the great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality.

Life , God , Beauty , Thinking

“Surround yourself with people that push you to do and be better. No drama or negativity. Just higher goals and higher motivation. Good times and positive energy. No jealousy or hate. Simply bringing out the absolute best in each other.”

Ralph Smart

Time , Hate , People , Motivation

“Sometime those who don't socialize much aren't actually anti-social. They just have no tolerance for drama, stupidity, and fake people.”

Ralph Smart

facebook

People , Stupidity

“Why should we not go to the extremes if we desire to play a part in the great world drama?...to go to the extremes is ever symptomatic of genius and greatness. Weakness is to compromise, to hesitate, to be halfhearted.”

Arthur Desmond (1859–1929) New Zealnd writer

Rival Caesars (1903)

World , Parting

“Remember that Puerto Rican literature always experienced a kind of shortcoming because there was a moral obligation to write realistically, to dramatize our struggle for independence—our colonial drama. If this was ignored, it became a faulty literature which should be punished with oblivion. Imaginative literature was practically disqualified…”

Luis Rafael Sánchez (1936) Puerto Rican playwright and novelist

On the thematic constraints of Puerto Rican literature in “Luis Rafael Sánchez: Counterpoints" https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00096005/00024/14j (Sargasso, 1984)

Imagination , Literature

“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 (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Alchemy in the Theatre (1994).

Time

“Oral tradition is really how Chicano literature came to be. I was not exposed to the written word, but I had the greatest teacher. I always tell people that my mother was my inspiration because she was the best chismosa, and she had the best stories. And if anyone taught me about drama, it was my mother because she knew how to tell a story. And my grandfather also told stories. One of the reasons why I waned to be a writer was because I was fascinated by stories of La Llorona, supernatural stories and things like that and I love hearing chisme (gossip)…”

Josefina Lopez (1969) American playwright

On her earliest influences in “JOSEFINA LÓPEZ – IN HER OWN WORDS” http://latinopia.com/latino-theater/josefina-lopez/ in Latinopia (2010 Mar 6)

People , Teachers , Literature , Love

“How man has come to be the complex being that he is and why, are questions that neither Science nor Religion makes conclusive answer to. This immortal thinker having such vast powers and possibilities, all his because of his intimate connection with every secret part of Nature from which he has been built up, stands at the top of an immense and silent evolution. He asks why Nature exists, what the drama of life has for its aim, how that aim may be attained….”

William Quan Judge (1851–1896) American occult writer

The Ocean of Theosophy by William Q. Judge (1893), Chapter 8, Of Reincarnation

Religion , Question , Nature , Secret

“Art has a breadth which encompasses all the forms of creativeness, in drama, poetry, dance, fine arts, music, and literature. Art is not the picture you see before you. Pictures are the products of art.”

Harvey Dwight Dash (1924–2002) American art educator

[Pictures Called Products Of Art., The Record, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harvey_Dwight_Dash_(1924-2002)_in_The_Record_of_Hackensack,_New_Jersey_on_5_November_1959.png, November 5, 1959, Harvey Dwight Dash]
Quote

Music , Dance , Literature , Art

“But how to write about a man who lived such a contemplative life marked by so few striking external events? He was extraordinarily private, and he kept his own person invisible in his writing. I had none of the material that ordinarily lends itself to narrative—no family dramas, no love affairs, jealousies, curious anecdotes, feuds, spats, or reunions. He had a large correspondence, but after his death his colleagues followed his instructions and removed almost all personal comments from his letters. No, not much external drama in his life: most scholars regard Spinoza as a placid and gentle soul—some compare his life to that of Christian saints, some even to Jesus.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Irvin D. Yalom, in his novel The Spinoza Problem, prologue. (New York: Basic Books, 2012)
S - Z

Family , Soul , Making love , Personality

“It is also a very curious thing. Why should a 17th-century Portuguese-Jewish philosopher whose dense and opaque writings are notoriously difficult to understand incite such passionate devotion, even obsession, among a lay audience in the 21st century? Part of the answer is the drama and mystery at the centre of his life: why exactly was Spinoza so harshly punished by the community that raised and nurtured him? Just as significant, I suspect, is that everyone loves an iconoclast – especially a radical and fearless one that suffered persecution in his lifetime for ideas and values that are still so important to us today. Spinoza is a model of intellectual courage. Like a prophet, he took on the powers-that-be with an unflinching honesty that revealed ugly truths about his fellow citizens and their society.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Steven Nadler, in his article Why Spinoza still matters https://aeon.co/essays/at-a-time-of-zealotry-spinoza-matters-more-than-ever (Aeon.co, 28 April 2016)
M - R, Steven Nadler

Courage , Understanding , Suffering , Communication

“His love of creating, the joy he took in it whether it was drama or comedy or his music, was inspiring to grow up around. The spirit he created on the set of The Andy Griffith Show was joyful and professional all at once. It was an amazing environment. And I think it was a reflection of the way he felt about having the opportunity to create something that people could enjoy. It was always with respect and passion for the opportunity and really what it could offer people in a very unpretentious and earthy way. He felt he was always working in service of an audience he really respected and cared about. He was a great influence on me. His passing is sad. But he lived a great rich life.”

Andy Griffith (1926–2012) American actor, television producer, Southern-gospel singer, and writer

Ron Howard, Nikki Finke, Editor in Chief. "EXCLUSIVE: Ron Howard On Andy Griffith". Deadline.com. Retrieved 2014-04-16.

Making love , People , Music , Joy

“We all naturally possess the most remarkable tool for connecting to people and attaining social power—empathy. When cultivated and properly used, it can allow us to see into the moods and minds of others, giving us the power to anticipate people’s actions and gently lower their resistance. This instrument, however, is blunted by our habitual self-absorption. We are all narcissists, some deeper on the spectrum than others. Our mission in life is to come to terms with this self-love and learn how to turn our sensitivity outward, toward others, instead of inward. We must recognize at the same time the toxic narcissists among us before getting enmeshed in their dramas and poisoned by their envy.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 2 : Transform Self-love into Empathy
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

Time , Envy , People , Learning

“The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth?”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

Because one did survive the wreck.
Epilogue
Moby-Dick: or, the Whale (1851)

“There has never been a time, until the last fifty years, when a majority of any population had regular and constant access to drama, and used this access. . . . It seems probable that in societies like Britain and the United States more drama is watched in a week or weekend, by the majority of viewers, than would have been watched in a year or in some cases a lifetime in any previous historical period. It is clearly one of the unique characteristics of advanced industrial societies that drama as an experience is now an intrinsic part of everyday life, at a quantitative level which is so very much greater than any precedent as to seem a fundamental qualitative change. Whatever the social and cultural reasons may finally be, it is clear that watching dramatic simulation of a wide range of experiences is now an essential part of our modern cultural pattern.”

Raymond Williams (1921–1988) philosopher

Television: Technology and Cultural Form

Life , Time , Parting , Change

“The world is your oyster if you’re unafraid to tell your own story and keep it universally appealing. But you have reason to be afraid of making live action children’s drama in Australia if the system is dismantled.”

Jonathan M. Shiff Australian television producer

Source: Interview with Jonathan Shiff https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/sa/screen-news/2018/06-18-international-tv-sales-snapshot-for-2017/part-4-interview-with-jonathan-shiff (18 June 2018)

World , Universe , Making love , Children

“It should also be remembered that the Bible is written in the language of symbols, a special category of literature designed both to conceal and to reveal spiritual truths. Blindness is a symbol for temporary unawareness of spiritual light. The Christ partly represents spiritual intuitiveness. When one who is spiritually blind becomes intuitively awakened and active or, symbolically, enters the presence of the Christ and is healed by him, the scales are said to have fallen from his eyes. This I believe to be the true symbolical interpretation; for I look upon the story as one of the many beautiful miniature mystery dramas to be found in the Bible, portraying in allegory and symbol the soul’s awakening from darkness to light. Nevertheless, symbolism apart, the answer given by the Lord was, as stated above, doctrinally and technically correct.”

Geoffrey Hodson (1886–1983) New Zealand occultist

Reincarnation & Christianity (1967)

Soul , Light , Beauty , Truth

“I think even if I did try to write something that had nothing to do with women or race, which are two pretty broad topics, I don’t know how I would do that. I don’t think there’s a way that I could write a buddy cop drama, or something really far from anything I’ve written, that didn’t have pieces of race and gender. Those are parts of the world we live in, and they are things I think about. It all comes into the voice of your writing, and you can’t write about someone else’s voice. You can only write in your own.”

Celeste Ng (1980) American novelist

On why she revisits certain themes in “AN INTERVIEW WITH CELESTE NG, THE 2018 INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE DAY AMBASSADOR” https://bookriot.com/2018/04/27/celeste-ng-interview/ in BookRiot (2018 Apr 27)

Women , Thinking , Way , World

“With a comedy, you can easily take away the humor. So it’s very important to keep the pacing of it going, and to keep the lighthearted nature of it going. I think in many ways, a comedy is more difficult than drama”

Anne Dudley (1956) English composer and pop musician

“The Hustle” Composer Anne Dudley On Her Creative Process And Storytelling Through Music: BUST Interview https://bust.com/movies/196048-anne-dudley-thehustle-interview.html (2019)

Way , Thinking , Nature

“I had been making dramas for some time and suddenly I wanted to change, I wanted to have new feelings.”

Tony Leung (1962) Hong Kong actor

"Actor Tony Leung is back after three-year break from cinema" in The Straits Times (24 December 2016) https://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/entertainment/actor-tony-leung-is-back-after-three-year-break-from-cinema

Time , Feeling , Change

“Good drama (and comedy) often comes from the simple act of placing characters in a situation that is not usual nor comfortable for them.”

Lynn Shelton (1965–2020) American film director, screenwriter, film editor, actress and film producer (1965-2020)

HuffPost Article - Interview with Lynn Shelton, Director of Humpday - 25 May 2011 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/interview-with-lynn-shelt_b_227673 - Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20210727183525/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/interview-with-lynn-shelt_b_227673

“I thought that the acting talent is something that you are born with. But now I have realized, with this drama, that acting is something that requires you to pour endless efforts on each piece.”

Kim Hye-ja (1941) South Korean actress

On performing in stage drama Doubt in "Kim Hye-ja returns to stage with 'Doubt'" in Han Cinema (20 November 2006) https://www.hancinema.net/herald-interviewkim-hye-ja-returns-to-stage-with-doubt--7779.html

Effort

“There was no intention of differentiating genres or fields. I was always involved in a variety of projects—depending on timing and circumstance. I’d like to continue challenging myself in various ways, such as movies, dramas and plays.”

Park So-dam (1991) South Korean actress

As quoted in "Parasite Star Park So-dam on Life Since the Oscars and New Korean Drama Record of Youth" in Time Magazine (16 September 2020) https://time.com/5889002/park-sodam-parasite-record-of-youth-interview/

Dependency , Time , Way

“Most people go through life never knowing the truth about the major events of their time. They're watching a farce performed at the edge of the stage while the real drama is going on behind the curtain.”

John Twelve Hawks book The Traveler

Source: Fourth Realm Trilogy (2005-2009), The Traveler (2005), Ch. 31

People , Truth , Life , Time

“Although Poole sometimes missed the cops-and-robbers dramas he had often enjoyed in his youth, he had grown to accept the current wisdom: excessive interest in pathological behaviour was itself pathological.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

1990s, 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997), p. 73

Youth , Wisdom

“When I become a character in a movie or drama … I can think about the character only and not the complicated matters of my own life. I feel ecstasy in those moments and it’s what keeps me going as an actor. It’s not about the money, it’s not about the honor.”

Gong Yoo (1979) South Korean actor

Source: "Gong Yoo on becoming South Korea’s leading man" in CNN https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/28/asia/gong-yoo-talk-asia/index.html (30 August 2017)

Money , Thinking , Life , Feeling

“Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion—and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings.”

Jordan Peterson book Maps of Meaning

Source: Books, Maps of Meaning (1999), p. 78

Religion , Behavior

“I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter. With the laugh comes the tears and in developing motion pictures or television shows, you must combine all the facts of life — drama, pathos and humor.”

Walt Disney (1901–1966) American film producer and businessman

Source: Year unknown, published in 2004, How to Be Like Walt : Capturing the Magic Every Day of Your Life (2004), Ch. 1 : It All Started with a Boy, p. 16

Tear , Life

“Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences — nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Entry (1977)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

Fate , Youth , Age

“Pornography is definitely not a reflection of real life. Accepted or rejected, it will always be at odds. However, sexual expression in pornography is a celebration of the denial of women's dignity. For a man, it is an affirmation of the myth of masculinity to dominate, to rule and to show his might. Conversely, for a woman, sex must be accepted as a form of willingness to be submissive, to submit to the destruction of her own dignity. In pornography there is no love, no passion or drama. There is only manipulation of the body, the mind and the lowly human desire to be satisfied. That humans cannot be separated from animalistic lust.”

Titon Rahmawan

Love , Life , Women , Passion

Quotes about drama page 4

Quotes about drama
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