|
80b8432
|
It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make ANYTHING all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight. But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting. - Amir
|
|
the-kite-runner
drama
|
Khaled Hosseini |
|
ea2109a
|
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
|
|
fiction
nick-carraway
drama
|
F. Scott Fitzgerald |
|
779db64
|
I can't go on, I'll go on.
|
|
tragedy
fiction
humor
tragic-comedy
nihilism
existentialism
drama
|
Samuel Beckett |
|
bc09302
|
You can't save others from themselves because those who make a perpetual muddle of their lives don't appreciate your interfering with the drama they've created. They want your poor-sweet-baby sympathy, but they don't want to change.
|
|
sympathy
kinsey-milhone
poor-baby
sue-grafton
drama
|
Sue Grafton |
|
185576d
|
A day wasted on others is not wasted on one's self.
|
|
greatest-author
inspiring-quotes
charles-dickens
drama
|
Charles Dickens |
|
b557b1b
|
Free yourself from the complexities and drama of your life. Simplify. Look within. Within ourselves we all have the gifts and talents we need to fulfill the purpose we've been blessed with.
|
|
simplify
gratitude
empowerment
motivational
life
inspirational
blessings
purpose
drama
|
Steve Maraboli |
|
6f4708f
|
Your complaints, your drama, your victim mentality, your whining, your blaming, and all of your excuses have NEVER gotten you even a single step closer to your goals or dreams. Let go of your nonsense. Let go of the delusion that you DESERVE better and go EARN it! Today is a new day!
|
|
action
earn-it
new-day
excuses
victim-mentality
dreams
motivational
inspirational
blaming
complaints
whining
goals
let-go
drama
|
Steve Maraboli |
|
fc21df4
|
I'd heard of Evergreen Care Center before. Cass and I had always made fun of the stupid ads they ran on TV, featuring some dragged-out woman with a limp perm and big, painted-on circles under her eyes, downing vodka and sobbing uncontrollably. "We can't heal you at Evergreen", the very somber voiceover said. "But we can help you to heal yourself." It had become our own running joke, applicable to almost anything
|
|
fiction
romance
inspirational
drama
self-help
|
Sarah Dessen |
|
e95b808
|
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.
|
|
action
victim-mentality
life
inspirational
self-empowerment
drama
|
Steve Maraboli |
|
0358a63
|
If she spoke, she would tell him the truth: she was not okay at all, but horribly empty, now that she knew what it was like to be filled.
|
|
fiction
love
truth
jodi-picoult
filled
plain-truth
say
okay
tell
empty
speak
mystery
drama
novel
|
Jodi Picoult |
|
c02ea1b
|
Rogerson," I asked him sweetly as we sat watching a video in the pool house, "where would I find the pelagic zone?
|
|
fiction
romance
inspirational
drama
|
Sarah Dessen |
|
a9731e6
|
We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.
|
|
theatre
life
exit
actors
entrance
transition
passage
drama
|
Tom Stoppard |
|
be20a3c
|
Your mother won a special reward," she told me, "because everyone had a head in her pictures. We all applauded.
|
|
fiction
romance
inspirational
drama
|
Sarah Dessen |
|
c6cec63
|
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.
|
|
literature
nature
poetry
writing
green
drama
|
Virginia Woolf |
|
47610cd
|
The leap of faith is this: You have to believe, or at least pretend you believe until you really believe it, that you are strong enough to take life face on. Eating disorders, on any level, are a crutch. They are also an addiction and illness, but there is no question at all that they are quite simply a way of avoiding the banal, daily, itchy pain of life. Eating disorders provide a little drama, they feed into the desire for constant excitement, everything becomes life-or-death, everything is terribly grand and crashing, very Sturm and Drang. And they are distracting. You don't have to think about any of the nasty minutiae of the real world, you don't get caught up in that awful boring thing called regular life, with its bills and its breakups and its dishes and laundry and groceries and arguments over whose turn it is to change the litter box and bedtimes and bad sex and all that, because you are having a real drama, not a sitcom but a GRAND EPIC, all by yourself, and why would you bother with those foolish mortals when you could spend hours and hours with the mirror, when you are having the most interesting sado-machistic affair with your own image?
|
|
sadomasochism
drama
mirror
eating-disorders
|
Marya Hornbacher |
|
7614d19
|
THE MARK OF ATHENA BABY!!!!!!
|
|
romance
cry-your-pants-off
extreme-awesemnes
greek-mythology
heart-breaking
drama
|
Rick Riordan |
|
04e5cb5
|
I have really sinned. I am going to pause now, and sit here on the mound repenting in deepest shame...
|
|
drama
|
Dodie Smith |
|
58c28d6
|
Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix, Her ashes new-create another heir As great in admiration as herself.
|
|
english-literature
drama
|
William Shakespeare |
|
f31f945
|
I'm sick of this. It's like being twelve again, dealing with all this damned drama.
|
|
relationships
the-rising
kelley-armstrong
corey
drama
|
Kelley Armstrong |
|
5336e3c
|
"She reached into the pocket of her dress and threw the small stack of bills at him. They fluttered to the ground like broken dreams. "I hope you choke on every penny." "Pick that up." She drew back her arm and slapped him as hard as she could."
|
|
heart-wrenching
drama
|
Susan Elizabeth Phillips |
|
a58e0ae
|
"I want her back" I said "I want HIM back"~Charlie"
|
|
sadness
drama
|
Ann M. Martin |
|
f5e2ed3
|
The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, the surely rationality was the driver. The theory states, in part, that competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he loses out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning. Where it is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational decisions, laws are passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which prohibit children from making contracts...Of course, the practice of capitalism has its contradictions...But television commercials make hash of it...By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama--a mythology, if you will--of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claim are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.
|
|
commercials
emotional-appeal
falsities
television-commercials
television
mcdonalds
public-discourse
idiocy
logic
drama
|
Neil Postman |
|
fe02578
|
The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions, for the peppery sensations associated, usually, not with monetary systems and taxation rates but with baptism by immersion in the creek, young love under the elms, straight whisky, angelic orchestras heard soaring down from the full moon, fear of death when an automobile teeters above a canyon, thirst in a desert and quenching it with spring water--all the primitive sensations which they thought they found in the screaming of Buzz Windrip.
|
|
politics
dramatic-politics
politicians
drama
|
Sinclair Lewis |
|
73225a1
|
Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.
|
|
metaphor
theatre
self-knowledge
masks
perception
drama
speech
|
George Eliot |
|
c31a4a3
|
The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama.
|
|
pain
joy
drama
|
Madeleine L'Engle |
|
b4dbfa8
|
"Kipster is a perfectly valid word," Wendy argued, about to write down her score on the little notepad that had come with the game. "Okay, so what does it mean?" Mandy wanted to know. Wendy struggled to come up with an answer, and finally just changed the subject with school gossip. Mandy found herself just ignoring it... it always sounded the same, the same events, same rumors, same secrets, same affairs, but never anything of interest to her. "Well Sarah's on drugs again and that's why she did it in Mario's backseat, but now she might be pregnant, oh, and that messed-up Seth kid's been cutting himself again so he was sent away to Halifax last week, and there's a festival in Wolfville but Kathy won't go because Audrey-Rose is going to be there and they hate each other, and...." Mandy had learned two years ago to detach herself from gossip; she'd learned it from Jud's death. Wendy may have been eighteen years old but she could be immature on the best of days."
|
|
suicide
words
funny
80-s
argue
kipster
cape-breton
nova-scotia
boring
eighties
drama-queen
scrabble
maturity
coming-of-age
canada
pollution
growing-up
baby
teenage
fighting
eating
gossip
bullying
scary
game
drama
self-harm
nostalgia
rumors
|
Rebecca McNutt |
|
7b373f8
|
In a strange way, I envied the quality of Morrie's time even as I lamented its diminishing supply. Why did we bother with all the distractions we did? .. give up days and weeks of our lives, addicted to someone else's drama.
|
|
ill
live
life
others
envy
quality
drama
dying
|
Mitch Albom |
|
96f6d32
|
It feels as though it were just yesterday Grandfather exited my life like a bullet, leaving a bleeding hole behind.
|
|
family-relationships
india
literary-fiction
immigration
drama
suspense
|
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni |
|
8b30c90
|
"FOXFIRE NEVER SAYS NEVER! By the time the kidnapped turquoise-and-chrome car overturns--turns and turns and turns!--in a snow-drifted field north of Tydeman's Corners Legs Sadovsky will have driven eleven miles from Eddy's Smoke Shop on Fairfax Avenue, six wild miles with the Highway Patrol cop in pursuit bearing up swiftly when the highway is clear and the girls are hysterical with excitement squealing and clutching one another thrown from side to side as Legs grimaces sighting the bridge ahead, it's one of those old-fashioned nightmare bridges with a steep narrow ramp, narrow floor made of planks but there's no time for hesitation Legs isn't going to use the brakes, she's shrewd, reasoning too that the cop will have to slow down, the fucker'll be cautious thus she'll have several seconds advantage won't she?--several seconds can make quite a difference in a contest like this so the Buick's rushing up the ramp, onto the bridge, the front wheels strike and spin and seem at first to be lifting in decorous surprise Oh! oh but astonishingly the car holds, it's a heavy machine of power that seems almost intelligent until flying off the bridge hitting a patch of slick part-melted ice the car swerves, now the rear wheels appear to be lifting, there's a moment when all effort ceases, all gravity ceases, the Buick a vessel of screams as it lifts, floats, it's being flung into space how weightless! Maddy's eyes are open now, she'll remember all her life this Now, now how without consequence! as the car hits the earth again, yet rebounds as if still weightless, turning, spinning, a machine bearing flesh, bones, girls' breaths plunging and sliding and rolling and skittering like a giant hard-shelled insect on its back, now righting itself again, now again on its back, crunching hard, snow shooting through the broken windows and the roof collapsing inward as if crushed by a giant hand upside-down and the motor still gunning as if it's frantic to escape, they're buried in a cocoon of bluish white and there's a sound of whimpering, panting,sobbing, a dog's puppyish yipping and a strong smell of urine and Legs is crying breathlessly half in anger half in exultation, caught there behind the wheel unable to turn, to look around, to see, "Nobody's dead--right?" Nobody's dead."
|
|
foxfire
drama
|
Joyce Carol Oates |
|
1c7b51b
|
All the girls stared at me with hatred in their eyes. It was a big drama that had to be acted out. But deep down, nobody really cared. The other girls didn't care about Jennifer. Jennifer didn't care about me. I didn't care about anything. Everyone was so full of crap.
|
|
girls
society
drama
|
Blake Nelson |
|
e3841d0
|
Chamberlain raised his saber, let loose the shout that was the greatest sound he could make, boiling the yell up from his chest: Fix bayonets! Charge! Fix bayonets! Charge! Fix bayonets! Charge! He leaped down from the boulder, still screaming, his voice beginning to to crack and give, and all around him his men were roaring animal screams, and he saw the whole Regiment rising and pouring over the wall and beginning to bound down through the dark bushes, over the dead and dying wounded, hats coming off, hair flying, mouths making sounds, one man firing as he ran, the last bullet, last round.
|
|
war
history
inspirational
gallantry
civil-war
civil-war-fiction
warrior
drama
|
Michael Shaara |
|
493e7ce
|
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.
|
|
extracurricular-activities
self-consciousness
shyness
drama
|
Alexandra Robbins |
|
3256776
|
- Ay! Thornton o' Marlborough Mill, as we call him. - He is one of the masters you are striving with, is he not? what sort of master is he? - Did yo' ever see a bulldog? Set a bulldog on hindlegs, and dress him up in coat and breeches, and yo'n just getten John Thornton.
|
|
romance
georgian-romance
period-drama
drama
|
Elizabeth Gaskell |
|
a1a6a40
|
"In fact the "mask" theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism", and Robert Jackall, in "Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate managers", refer repeatedly to the "masks" that corporate functionaries are required to wear, like actors in an ancient Greek drama. According to Jackall, corporate managers stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces. Kimberly seems to have perfected the requisite phoniness and even as I dislike her, my whole aim is to be welcomed into the same corporate culture that she seems to have mastered, meaning that I need to "get in the face" of my revulsion and overcome it. But until I reach that transcendent point, I seem to be stuck in an emotional space left over from my midteen years: I hate you; please love me."
|
|
theatre
morality
mask
corporate-culture
corporate-world
phony
faking
fake
masks
smile
moral
smiling
drama
self-control
|
Barbara Ehrenreich |
|
a4a21fc
|
I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.
|
|
literature
illusion
subterfuge
drama
|
Iris Murdoch |
|
9d40041
|
Think'st thou heaven is such a glorious thing? I tell thee, 'tis not so fair as thou Or any man that breathes on earth.
|
|
love
drama
|
Christopher Marlowe |
|
efb4de1
|
Twenty years earlier, in a life [Kirsten] mostly couldn't remember, she had had a small nonspeaking role in a short-lived Toronto production of King Lear. Now she walked in sandals whose soles had been cut from an automobile tire, three knives in her belt.
|
|
shakespeare
life
post-apocalyptic
dystopia
art
play
drama
|
Emily St. John Mandel |
|
244bee5
|
I would later discover it was a bad idea to gather more than two of these people in an enclosed area for any length of time. The stage was not only a physical place but also a state of mind, and the word audience was defined as anyone forced to suffer your company. We young actors were a string of lightbulbs left burning 24 hours a day, exhausting ourselves and others with our self-proclaimed brilliance.
|
|
aspiring-actors
drama
|
David Sedaris |
|
4777132
|
"I wish I could run away," Rudger told Jersey as they both rushed in and out of various patients' rooms, darting around like little ants. "I can't leave and be on my own though, not right now, anyway." "Why?" asked Jersey, waving her flashlight in mid-air. Rudger froze for a second, a regretful haze emanating from his eyes. "It'd break her heart if I left." "Ain't that normal? For parents to have mixed feelings about their kids growin' up?" "Not for me, it isn't." Jersey made a pitying face in his direction. "So, you wanna keep bein' towed around with your mom, livin' in a gross town like Danvers?" "Is there a choice?" "Yeah, there sure is. You can run away and try to be a whole person before it's too late, or you can live with mommy dearest forever and turn into Norman Bates."
|
|
rebellion
friendship
backwater
danvers-state
heaert-heartbreak
mommy
norman-bates
runaway
rural
teen-roance
mental-hospital
emotional
small-town
parent
normal
gross
drama
|
Rebecca McNutt |