These melodrama quotes will inspire you. A modern melodrama is a dramatic work wherein the plot, typically sensationalized and for a strong emotional appeal, takes precedence over detailed characterization.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging melodrama quotes, melodrama sayings, and melodrama proverbs.
Best Melodrama Quotes
- “The world sometimes feels like an insane asylum. You can decide whether you want to be an inmate or pick up your visitor’s badge. You can be in the world but not engage in the melodrama of it; you can become a spiritual being having a human experience thoroughly and fully.” ~ Deepak Chopra
- “In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters.” ~ Sidney Lumet
- “If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody’s mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.” ~ Lillian Hellman
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“One can play comedy, two are required for melodrama, but a tragedy demands three.” ~ Elbert Hubbard
- “But I have had enough melodrama in this life, and would willingly give my five senses if they could ensure us our present peace and security. Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind. Of course, we have our moments of depression; but there are other moments too, when time, unmeasured by the clock, runs on into eternity and, catching his smile, I know we are together, we march in unison, no flash of thought or opinion makes a barrier between us.” ~ Daphne du Maurier
- “Shredded feelings are the fuel that feed the machinery of melodrama. And good melodrama just has honest feelings and is honest about the way people interact.” ~ Guy Maddin
- “The constraints of melodrama can be a great blessing because they demand that all the characters involved – as absurd and extreme as they may initially seem – must stay utterly rooted in their own reality, or the whole project collapses.” ~ Stanley Tucci
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“If a man went simply by what he saw, he might be tempted to affirm that the essence of democracy is melodrama.” ~ Irving Babbitt
- “Arguments are often like melodramas – they have a predictable beginning, middle, and end.” ~ Gay Hendricks
- “All good, clean stories are melodrama, it’s just the set of devices that determines how you show or hide it.” ~ Baz Luhrmann
- “So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.” ~ Douglas Sirk
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“Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.” ~ Daphne du Maurier
- “I think that’s what distinguishes Schmidt, really. In the movies now, so much of what is appealing to an audience is the dramatic or has to do with science fiction, and Schmidt is simply human. There’s no melodrama; there’s no device, It’s just about a human being.” ~ Jack Nicholson
- “I like melodrama because it is situated just at the meeting point between life and theater.” ~ Luchino Visconti
- “There is a fine line I have to walk throughout the writing process in a novel. It is this line between drama and melodrama, and it is this line between evoking genuine emotional power and being manipulative.” ~ Nicholas Sparks
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“Parsi theater was known for melodrama.” ~ Irrfan Khan
- “Teenagers all think their life is a movie. If you break up with someone or you have a fight, you walk around with movie scores playing in your head. You sort of see yourself suffering as you’re suffering. There’s a lot of melodrama attached to the real events of your life.” ~ Kenneth Lonergan
- “Turn your melodrama into a mellow drama.” ~ Ram Dass
- “I’m obsessive about the kind of melodrama of getting through the days and trying to make them good and funny and a happy experience. But my feeling towards the fans is that they delivered me from darkness.” ~ Tom Baker
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“Fighting your ego is a melodrama of the ego.” ~ Deepak Chopra
- “I cry all the time when I watch ‘Glee’ because I don’t know if it’s satire or melodrama and that makes me feel like the writing is aware of itself, and that makes it OK to cry.” ~ David Sedaris
- “Addiction is the number one disease of civilization, and it’s, directly and indirectly, related to all other diseases. Besides physical addictions to nicotine, alcohol, and other substances, there are psychological addictions, such as the addiction to work, sex, television, melodrama, and perfection.” ~ Deepak Chopra
- “For the broadcast business to be successful, viewers need to be not merely interested in our political melodramas, they have to be in an absolute state about them – emotionally invested in the outcome and frightened not to watch what happens next.” ~ Matt Taibbi
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“Being in the moment means not being distracted by the melodrama and hysteria around you. Present-moment awareness allows solutions to emerge.” ~ Deepak Chopra
- “In this context of achievement-and-death, artist who make Happenings are living out the purest melodrama. Their activity embodies the myth of nonsuccess, for Happenings cannot be sold and taken home; they can only be supported.” ~ Allan Kaprow
- “Commercialism is laying its great greasy paw upon everything including the irresponsible quest of thrills; so that, whatever democracy may be theoretically, one is sometimes tempted to define it practically as standardized and commercialized melodrama.” ~ Irving Babbitt
- “I define melodrama as truth uninhibited. It’s the kind of truth we dream about. Rather than melodrama being exaggerated, it’s actually uninhibited. And it’s a big difference – people look down on exaggerations, but I think they should look up to the un-inhibitions.” ~ Guy Maddin
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“History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.” ~ Robert Penn Warren
- “Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others-in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance-they were almost in the nature of a continuous performance.” ~ Gertrude Atherton
- “If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the world is provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer’s contribution seems not only absorbed but translated…. One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.” ~ Eric Bentley
- “Melodrama is one of my working tools and it enables me to obtain effects that would be unobtainable otherwise; on the other hand I am not deliberately melodramatic; don’t get too annoyed if I say that I write in the way that I do because I am what I am.” ~ Graham Greene
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“You know, I might miss some of your witticisms when you’re gone, but one thing I won’t miss? Your overwhelming sense of melodrama and despair. It’s too much even for me.” ~ Richelle Mead
- “Her life was a slow realization that the world was not for her and that for whatever reason she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. table ivory elephant charm rainbow onion hairdo violence melodrama honey…None of it moved her. She addressed the world honestly searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her but to each, she would have to say I don’t love you.” ~ Jonathan Safran Foer
- “William Shakespeare was the most remarkable storyteller that the world has ever known. Homer told of adventure and men at war, Sophocles and Tolstoy told of tragedies and of people in trouble. Terence and Mark Twain told cosmic stories, Dickens told melodramatic ones, Plutarch told histories and Hans Christian Andersen told fairy tales. But Shakespeare told every kind of story – comedy, tragedy, history, melodrama, adventure, love stories, and fairy tales – and each of them so well that they have become immortal. In all the world of storytelling, he has become the greatest name.” ~ Marchette Chute
- ““The three of you are enough to drive a mara mad. ‘She can wear my shirt,’” she growled in imitation of Nash.”No, she can wear my shirt,” she said switching to Tod’s smoother tone. Then Sabine took off down the hall without a glance at any of us.”I have a spare. Come on, Kaylee, before I choke on testosterone and melodrama.”” ~ Rachel Vincent
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“He had the air of a spy in a melodrama, missing nothing, liking nothing, looking forward to the great day when everything would be turned upside down.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
- “Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn’t death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn’t bring death home to anyone- it doesn’t catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says- ‘One day you are going to die.” ~ Tom Stoppard
- “Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.” ~ L.P. Hartley
- “Post-wounded women know that postures of pain play into limited and outmoded conceptions of womanhood. Their hurt has a new native language spoken in several dialects: sarcastic, jaded, opaque; cool, and clever. They guard against those moments when melodrama or self-pity might split their careful seams of intellect, expose the shame of self-absorption without self-awareness.” ~ Leslie Jamison
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“Somewhere in Time is in the top-five cheesiest movies ever made. Its super melodrama.” ~ Mark Duplass
- “I chose the American ones, more or less the last five years of the silent era because those are the ones that aged the best in the way they tell the story. One, it’s about human beings with context. It’s a very classical story with feelings, with laughter, melodrama and it really works, the good ones – Murnau’s American movies, John Ford’s Four Sons, King Vidor’s The Crowd, or the (Josef) von Sternberg movies. You can watch it now and it still works. I mean they are really, really good pieces so this is where I tried to work.” ~ Michel Hazanavicius
- “We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.” ~ Adrienne Rich
- “The fact that you couldn’t see Alfred Hitchcock’s first film The Mountain Eagle, or that you couldn’t see so many of F.W. Murnau’s masterpieces, or that you couldn’t see so many of Oscar Micheaux’s really intriguing race melodramas, made with fierce independent spirit against all odds in ’20s and ’30s America. That stuff haunted me. They really did bring to life a sense of 20th Century history: cultural history, pop history, gender politics and race politics, socio-economic history, all that stuff. It was bracing and instructive.” ~ Guy Maddin
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“Penalties are not football. They are not even as television people keep telling us, great drama. They are cheap melodrama.” ~ Simon Barnes
- “Kenney knows two essential truths about melodrama: First that it is most powerful when combined with irony and understatement; and second that it is a salient feature of modern life.” ~ Stefan Kanfer
- “I tend to avoid melodrama. I try to create very realistic settings and very realistic experiences and realistic responses to these experiences. Melodrama is the use of really big events that may or may not happen in real life – certainly, they do, but they’re not events that are common to most people. Most of the things that happen in my novels are things that could happen to people in real life.” ~ Nicholas Sparks
- “Opera was an enormous part of my childhood. My parents were both opera buffs, and they met in the box seat of an opera performance. And I also was a boy soprano, so before puberty hit, I was on stage playing a wide variety of orphans and urchins in all sorts of operas, and the sheer melodrama of their stories was just always appealing to me.” ~ Daniel Handler
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“What concerns me fundamentally is a meteoric burlesque melodrama, born of the immemorial adage love will find a way.” ~ e. e. cummings
- “Nobody beats a bunch of journalists for inflating their rather mundane straightforward chores with a lot more melodrama and self-importance than the job should be asked to contain.” ~ Larry King
- “So there’s a choice that I made to tell stories that are still psychological melodramas about domestic issues. The challenge is to figure out how to make 10 films a career as a filmmaker, and that’s a really challenging thing.” ~ Ira Sachs
- “It’s an ongoing process, in the script, on the set and in the editing room, to make sure you are being true to the emotion of the film without turning it into a melodrama, and making sure you’re getting all the laughs you can without it turning into just some stupid comedy.” ~ Jon Turteltaub
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“Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity. I do not think… of art as a situation of comfort.” ~ Willem de Kooning
- “Social questions are too sectional, too topical, too temporal to move a man to the mighty effort which is needed to produce great poetry. Prison reform may nerve Charles Reade to produce an effective and businesslike prose melodrama; but it could never produce Hamlet, Faust, or Peer Gynt.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
- “What’s interesting is that Citizen Kane was meant as an anti-fascist/anti-capitalist melodrama and for Donald Trump, it becomes just another kind of misogynistic claim that misses the point.” ~ Errol Morris
- “If I’m going to go to the opera, I want to see the costumes and the melodrama.” ~ Jaime Winstone
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“Come on, Kaylee, before I choke on testosterone and melodrama.” ~ Rachel Vincent
- “Love in France is a comedy; in England a tragedy; in Italy an opera seria; and in Germany a melodrama.” ~ Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
- “Euripides seems to have felt that the dignified perfection of Sophocles could be challenged only by novelty and irresponsibility. The religious conditions of the Dionysian festival kept him within certain bounds. But within the imposed limits Euripides was as profane as he dared to be, making melodrama of the divine realities which his predecessors accepted religiously, using the stage merely as a convenience for popularizing his own eccentric values.” ~ Laura Riding
- “I tend not to attempt to describe pain. I don’t feel I can comprehend or re-create the personal suffering of others, so I simply try to tell what happened, or what I imagine happened. I also think it helps to let the reader fill in a lot of the blanks. Melodrama is patronizing. With a straightforward statement, readers can figure out for themselves what’s going on.” ~ Elizabeth Wein
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“I think of myself as a realistic writer, not a creator of soap opera or melodrama.” ~ Joyce Maynard
- “I feel the need to chastise myself. A movie that’s a partial musical, full-on melodrama, should require a tremendous amount of planning.” ~ Guy Maddin
- “There’s a real tension between it being a collaborative art process, which is almost like performance art of yourself, and, as we talk about the movie, it’s kind of a mix between melodrama and cinéma vérité. This involves ideas about playing the role of yourself and the movie of your life and all these other things.” ~ Robert Greene
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“I think that melodrama is a safe way of suffering because your suffering is fake. That’s why I like melodrama.” ~ Luis Negron
- “I came to this project and ‘Far from Heaven’ from completely different vantage points. ‘Heaven’ was of course about the Douglas Sirk films of that period, with the very specific cinematic language and style of melodrama. With ‘Carol,’ it was presented to me already packaged, with Cate Blanchett attached and Phyllis Nagy’s script complete – when it came to me it had a long history and pre-history.” ~ Todd Haynes
- “As so often, a political event involving Donald Trump looks like swinging wildly between melodrama and farce. The Republican National Convention in Cleveland has begun with accusations of plagiarism after Mr Trump’s wife Melania gave a speech dotted with sentences that appeared to have been lifted from a speech that Michelle Obama gave in 2008.” ~ Mark Colvin
