Brian Dennehy Quotes

Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions.

I'm attracted to pathos, because life is mostly pathos. I've had a lot of it in my life.

Sorrow lies like a heartbeat behind everything I have written.

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.

My favorite songs to sing have always been songs about regret. I don't know why that is, but to me, that's country music.

One thing the blues ain't, is funny.

Even the greatest poets can't express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances.

Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man Time with a gift of tears, Grief with a glass that ran .

The brooding is better than the joy because even if the heart fills with happiness, it still mourns.

My heart is tuned to sorrow, and the strings Vibrate most readily to minor chords, Searching and sad; my mind is stuffed with words Which voice the passion and the ache of things: Illusions beating with their baffled wings Against the walls of circumstance.

The weeping of the guitar begins. The goblets of dawn are smashed. The weeping of the guitar begins. Useless to silence it. Impossible to silence it. It weeps monotonously as water weeps as the wind weeps over snowfields. Impossible to silence it. It weeps for distant things. Hot southern sands yearning for white camellias. Weeps arrow without target evening without morning and the first dead bird on the branch. Oh, guitar! Heart mortally wounded by five swords.

I think for a minute. Watching my wife fade into the distance, I put a hand on my heart. "Dead." I wave a hand toward my wife. "Dead." My eyes drift toward the sky and lose their focus. "Want it...to hurt. But...doesn't." Julie looks at me like she's waiting for more, and I wonder if I've expressed anything at all with my halting, mumbled soliloquy. Are my words ever actually audible, or do they just echo in my head while people stare at me, waiting? I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.

Poetry is just so emo." he said. "Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.

I do have the ability to explore life and to be over the moon at the smallest thing - a few pints and a craic in the pub and I'm in heaven. But I have a melancholy side to me as well. Acting allows me to feel things, it kind of buys me human experience. And I don't mean this as acting as higher cause, because it's not, but it does kind of have a higher awareness emotionally.

I'm a poet,' the young man said, 'And it's my job to remember the sadness of things.

I read Naoko's letter again and again, and each time I read it I would be filled with the same unbearable sadness I used to feel whenever Naoko stared into my eyes. I had no way to deal with it, no place I could take it to or hide it away. Like the wind passing over my body, it had neither shape nor weight, nor could I wrap myself in it.

When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry.

The blues is also existential and offers a sense of mature reflection that enabled it to be the leitmotif of modern life.

Tell me what we had was real, I whisper.

You're the Picasso of pain.

...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.

Did you ever see a portrait of a great man without perceiving strong traits of pain and anxiety?

In romantic comedies there's a certain ceiling and a floor that you can't necessarily love as hard, or hate as hard, or have as much pain, because you sink the shop of the romantic comedy. But in a certain drama, like some of the ones I've been doing, the ceiling and the floor was my own. And in many ways, that was a higher ceiling and a lower floor, so that was more of a band-with for those emotions.

The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. Be a man before being an artist!