O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! And yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all hooping.
Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
Romanticism is the mother of kitsch and that there are moments when the child becomes so like its mother that one cannot differentiate between them
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.
I like melodrama because it is situated just at the meeting point between life and theater.
It's a great comfort to some people to groan over their imaginary ills.
Sometimes I feel like I'm taking on a role when I'm writing a song, and it doesn't always have to be true. I'm not sitting in my room crying with my guitar, writing a slow solo about a depressing breakup; that's not me.
I knew the human exaggeration for sorrow-a broken heart.
First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.
But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man, who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it?
It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility
Some persons are exaggerators by temperament. They do not mean untruth, but their feelings are strong, and their imaginations vivid, so that their statements are largely discounted by those of calm judgment and cooler temperament. They do not realize that we always weaken what we exaggerate.
Ivy waved her wet handkerchief, as much as to say 'words cannot possibly articulate my profound distress'. Then, because Ivy never settled for meaningful gestures when verbal embellishments could compound the effect, she said, "Words cannot possibly articulate my profound distress.
All passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate.
Affection, like melancholy, magnifies trifles; but the magnifying of the one is like looking through a telescope at heavenly objects; that of the other, like enlarging monsters with a microscope.
Perhaps, from an innate desire of justification, sorrow always exaggerates itself. Memory is quite one of Job's friends; and the past is ever ready to throw its added darkness on the present.
There is no tongue that flatters like a lover's; and yet, in the exaggeration of his feelings, flattery seems to him commonplace. Strange and prodigal exuberance, which soon exhausts itself by flowing!
In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters.
The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.
Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose -- as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles.
One tires of a page of which every sentence sparkles with points, of a sentimentalist who is always pumping the tears from his eyes or your own.
Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.
My standup persona is like I'll heighten things, but I'm observing the world as it is in sort of a heightened emotional state.
Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.
I knew it!" He pumps a fist into the air. "You've fallen in love with me. You want to have my babies. We'll get a team of horses and a covered wagon and we'll journey to South America and raise goats.
