Catharsis Quotes

I have discovered, passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them. This becomes clearer and clearer. It is just at those moments when I feel least sorrow - getting into my morning bath is usually one of them - that H. rushes upon my mind in her full reality, her otherness. Not, as in my worst moments, all foreshortened and patheticized and solemnized by my miseries, but as she is in her own right. This is good and tonic.

Music can be a source of escapism.

Acting is therapeutic.

The cure for pain is in the pain.

When movement isn't enough, you dance, or when speaking isn't enough, you sing. When it's organic, and it's earned like that in a musical, that's when it works, and then there's nothing like it because it's this thing that takes you to a whole 'nother level, you know?

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.

I think the live show is a different kind of catharsis. It's an event. It's supposed to be entertaining. To keep myself entertained, I like to play a rock n' roll show. I still kind of feel like I'm a rock n' roll musician anyway.

I think a lot of my songs are very silly and very stupid, written to entertain people, but in the end, I always come to that last line, and I feel that I have to wrap this up with a bit of dignity and a little tear in the eye; otherwise, the joke would be on the characters in the song.

The time I burned my guitar it was like a sacrifice. You sacrifice the things you love. I love my guitar.

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

One of the most incredible and important things about the theater is that we're creating a safe space for all feelings, but especially, ugly feelings.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Singing was a liberating experience for me.

Ain't nothing like a good cry.

Humor is tragedy plus time.

All people are sad clowns. That's the key to comedy - and it's a buffer against reality.

Destruction is always an attractive idea. My brother and I used to spend weeks making models of cities so that we could destroy them in 15 minutes. There's a fantastic joy in destroying something that you've meticulously built. Then you're free to build a new thing. Destruction and creation... they're inseparable.

King Lear alone among these plays has a distinct double action. Besides this, it is impossible, I think, from the point of view of construction, to regard the hero as the leading figure.

Sometimes what we call tragedy, at least in the theater, are really case histories. They're based on the central figure, and things happen to that person, and they're called tragedy because they're extremely sad. But tragedy always has a glorious thing happen at the end of it. That's what the catharsis is.

In drama you can either pretend everything is OK, or you can show the world as it really is in the hope that it gets better.

The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.

Perhaps our imagination needs crime stories to fulfill some craving we have, as a way to assuage a darkness in ourselves.

Everybody feels up sometimes, they feel down sometimes, sometimes they feel sideways, sometimes they feel weird. And the beauty of music is you can express all those different feelings in all the different songs you write. And hopefully, people can identify with those.

I try to make the audience forget all their problems -- for an hour and a half or so get them out of themselves, and space, and time, and consciousness.