It is the custom on the stage: in all good, murderous melodramas: to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon. The hero sinks upon his straw bed, weighed down by fetters and misfortunes; and, in the next scene, his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience with a comic song. We behold, with throbbing bosoms, the heroine in the grasp of a proud and ruthless baron: her virtue and her life alike in danger; drawing forth a dagger to preserve the one at the cost of the other; and, just as our expectations are wrought up to the highest pitch, a whistle is heard: and we are straightway transported to the great hall of the castle: where a grey-headed seneschal sings a funny chorus with a funnier body of vassals, who are free of all sorts of places from church vaults to palaces, and roam about in company, carolling perpetually.

Such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would seem at first sight. The transitions in real life from well-spread boards to death-beds, and from mourning weeds to holiday garments, are not a whit less startling; only, there, we are busy actors, instead of passive lookers-on; which makes a vast difference. The actors in the mimic life of the theatre, are blind to violent transitions and abrupt impulses of passion or feeling, which, presented before the eyes of mere spectators, are at once condemned as outrageous and preposterous.

Charles Dickens

Tags: life tragedy comedy melodrama



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Melodramas of moral courage provide satisfaction through the comforting fantasy that our own character would hold steady under the most extreme pressure of dreadful events. [But we must face] the painful awareness that in all likelyhood one's own character would not have stood firm.

Jonathan Shay

Tags: reality war pride melodrama



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You have more zeal than good taste, Martín. The disease afflicting you has a name, and that is Grand Guignol: it does to drama what syphilis does to your privates. Getting it might be pleasurable, but from then on it's all downhill.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Tags: humor melodrama



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I embrace the purpose of God and the doom assigned

Alfred Tennyson

Tags: poetry philosophical melodrama



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He holds his hands up to keep the Reapers from advancing. I forgot Zack's flair for the melodramatic. ~Exposing ELE

Courtney Nuckels

Tags: humor melodrama bad-guy villain reapers flair exposing-ele



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We seem to be unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare and unfair are our professional failures, how rife with misunderstandings are our relationships, how deep are our sorrows. Melodrama is individually always the order of the day.

Alain de Botton

Tags: life relationships self significance sorrows melodrama



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We need to get out," I said. My voice sounded raw to me. "Trouble coming."

"No," said a beautiful Sidhe baritone. "Trouble is here."

They appeared from behind their veils, one by one, with so much melodrama that I was mildly surprised that they hadn't each struck some kind of kung fu pose.

Jim Butcher

Tags: melodrama



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Ma was out back, head in hands, weaving in and out of her heaped-up crap. It was both melodramatic and not. I mean, when Ma feels something deeply, that's what she does: melodrama. Which makes it, I guess, not melodrama?

George Saunders

Tags: melodrama george-saunders tenth-of-december



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