Stage And Performance Quotes

So you put me through all this suffering just to taunt me?'

'Humans suffer because they take seriously that which we create for entertainment.'

'Oh really? Because let me tell you, I wasn't the least bit entertained!'

'That's because you were not being entertained, Mr Fantoccio, you were being enlightened,' stated the Mistress through a pair of foggy eyes. 'You want to know why painting never worked for you? Because painters are creators and you, Mr Fantoccio, are an overseer. You don't care about setting up the puppet show; you are merely interested in giving it a good ending. For you, Mr Fantoccio, creating the world was never enough; you aspire to run it. With every breath, you want to shape it. With every choice, you need to control it. ~ Louise Blackwick

All they teach you in drama school is how to do stage fights and be a pain in rehearsals. ~ Craig Ferguson

Over-seriousness is a warning sign for mediocrity and bureaucratic thinking. People who are seriously committed to mastery and high performance are secure enough to lighten up. ~ Michael J. Gelb

Forever. To create a family with a spouse is one of the most fundamental ways a person can find continuity and meaning in American (or any) society. I rediscover this truth every time I go to a big reunion of my mother's family in Minnesota and I see how everyone is held so reassuringly in their positions over the years. First you are a child, then you are a teenager, then you are a young married person, then you are a parent, then you are retired, then you are a grandparent - at every stage you know who you are, you know what your duty is and you know where to sit at the reunion. You sit with the other children, or teenagers, or young parents, or retirees. Until at last you are sitting with the ninety-year-olds in the shade, watching over your progeny with satisfaction. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I have had a very difficult time with stage fright; it undermines your well-being and peace of mind, and it can also threaten your livelihood. ~ Renee Fleming

The only difference with wrestling is we're like a live performance. So we're feeding off the audience and if they do't like something, they can let us know immediately. ~ Adam Cole

Consider these traditional theories of domestic abuse:
-Learned helplessness suggest that abused women learn to become helpless under abusive conditions; they are powerless to extricate themselves from such relationships and/or unable to make adaptive choices
-The cycle of violence describes a pattern that includes a contrition or honeymoon phase. The abusive husband becomes contrite and apologetic after a violent episode, making concerted efforts to get back in his wife's good graces.
-Traumatic bonding attempts to explain the inexplicable bond that is formed between a woman and her abusive partner
-The theory of past reenactments posits that women in abusive relationships are reliving unconscious feelings from early childhood scenarios.
My research results and experience with patients do not conform to these concepts. I have found that the upscale abused wife is not a victim of learned helplessness. Rather, she makes specific decisions along the path to be involved in the abusive marriage, including silent strategizing as she chooses to stay or leave the marriage. Nor does the upscale abused wife experience the classic cycle of violence, replete with the honeymoon stage, in which the husband courts his wife to seek her forgiveness. As in the case of Sally and Ray, the man of means actually does little to seek his wife's forgiveness after a violent episode.
Further, the upscale abused wife voices more attachment to her lifestyle than the trauma ~ Susan Weitzman

The United Nations cannot do anything, and never could; it is not an animate entity or agent. It is a place, a stage, a forum and a shrine ... a place to which powerful people can repair when they are fearful about the course on which their own rhetoric seems to be propelling them. ~ Conor Cruise O'Brien

...God doesn't wait for you to reach maturity before he starts liking you. He loves and enjoys you at every stage of your spiritual development. ~ Rick Warren

At times, I've been so absolutely terrified of what I was about to do, whether it was public speaking or performance. Whatever it was, sometimes it had me really, really shaking in my shoes, and I decided that I was going to do it no matter what. And, of course, the critic is there, and afterwards, there's this, "Was it good enough? Was it really all I wanted to say?" ~ Annie Lennox

I don't know which I like best. I love the applause on the stage. But pictures are so fascinating - you reach many millions through them. And you make more money too. ~ Ginger Rogers

I was very happy with Vampire's Kiss, which in my opinion was almost like an independent laboratory to start realizing some of my more expressionistic dreams with film performance. Then using what I had learned in Vampire's Kiss and putting it into a very big action movie in the form of Face/Off with John Woo. If you look at those two movies back to back, you can see where I stole from my performance in Vampire's Kiss. ~ Nicolas Cage

Ever since I was younger I wanted to be on stage, singing my songs in a glittering costume. And that happened and is still happening. I have to remember that this is what I wished for and be grateful because there are 500 other girls right behind me that are ready to snatch it up. ~ Katy Perry

Any play is hard to write, and plays are getting harder and harder to get on the stage. ~ Alan Alda

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven. ~ Walter Benjamin

I really can't tell at this stage, Jack. You know, I'd hoped to get through life without a case of this kind, but John Taylor pointed at me and said, 'You're It. ~ Harper Lee

Because I am a part of the Big Picture, I do matter and substantially so. Because I am only a part, however, I am rightly situated off to stage right - and happily so. What freedom there is in such truth! We are inherently important and included, yet not burdened with manufacturing or sustaining that private importance. Our dignity is given by God, and we are freed from ourselves! ~ Richard Rohr

I just try to approach every opportunity on stage, as if it's my first time and my last time. ~ Misty Copeland

I can never remember being afraid of an audience. If the audience could do better, they'd be up here on stage and I'd be out there watching them. ~ Ethel Merman

Frankie stayed off the stage for once, even when Daniel abandoned it for food. "I know when to sit it out," Frankie said, waving a chicken-laden fork first in his brother's direction and then toward the room. "Tonight I will let 'em watch and yearn. ~ Melissa Jensen

Good morning, Mike," I mumbled, making a beeline for the coffeepot.
"Oooooh!" he teased again. "Someone is getting married tonight! Woooooooo…"
"Yep," I said, taking that first glorious sip of java. "Hard to believe, isn't it?"
Mike put his hand over his mouth and snickered. Then he asked, "So…are you guys gonna do some…some kissin'?"
"I certainly hope so," I said. This only served to make Mike laugh harder.
"Ooooooh!" he squealed. "Are you gonna have a baby?"
Oh, Lord.
I took another hit of Gevalia and answered, "Not today." Mike cracked up again. He was clearly on a roll.
"What's so funny this morning, Mike?" I asked.
"Your s-s-s-stomach is gonna get so fat," he answered. Mike was quickly approaching manic stage--the result of a large, busy weekend and his routine being disrupted. Soon the inevitable crash would come. I just hoped I was on the plane to Australia when it happened. It wasn't going to be pretty.
"Oh, whatever, Mike," I answered, feigning indignation. ~ Ree Drummond

Television is a different challenge; it is not a stage. But each opportunity that I have to learn I learn, and I take the opportunity to work. ~ Ruben Santiago-Hudson

My style is definitely schizophrenic; it does change from day to day a lot. It depends on my mood: sometimes I'll be going through a girly, childlike stage and wear a pretty lace dress with a bow in my hair. Then sometimes I'll be moody and just wear black. ~ Amber Le Bon

You want people to think. You want people to be emotionally moved. And there's a theory behind that in terms of storytelling. It has been around for thousands of years. And that's where something like live theater or a live performance is something that is very valuable because you get instant feedback from your audience and you kind of know the things that work and the things that don't work. ~ George Lucas

Chopper asked to be in our band back in 1999 (we already had chosen somebody else who ended up annoying us) and then we kept running into and hanging out with him at concerts and car shows. We became friends. He shares the same passions as we do and every time we ran into him he looked like he was ready to step on stage with the Cramps. He was in Mr. Badwrench and before that he was in the Maus Maus when he was a teenager. ~ Lux Interior

… our nation's truly critical problems are built into the very structure of the economic and political system; they are not something passing in the night that will go away even when we elect forward-looking leaders and actively pressure them to move in a different direction. ~ Gar Alperovitz

The stranger looked at his watch; he jumped to his feet. "Nine o'clock! Mrs. Braile, I'm ashamed. But you must blame your husband, partly. Good night, ma'am; good - Why, look here, Squire Braile!" he arrested himself in offering his hand. "How about the obscurity of the scene where Joe Smith founded his superstition, which bids fair to live right along with the other false religions? Was Leatherwood, Ohio, a narrower stage than Manchester, New York? And in point of time the two cults were only four years apart. ~ William Dean Howells

There are couples who are very fearful of bringing children into the mix because they feel like somehow that link between them as a couple is going to somehow dissolve or become less powerful or whatever. And that somehow the child is going to disrupt their happy stage. Of course it is true, that's exactly what a child does but it's not something to be feared, it's to be embraced. ~ Rosamund Pike

It kept coming back to joy-- how could I live a life filled with it? And always, the answer that came back to me was "Write."

... I am here because of the indigenous people of this country, because of the enslaved people who were here before me, the young people of the civil rights movements who fought hard to get me to this moment.

My biggest responsibility is to recognize that I am part of the continuum, that I didn't just appear and start writing stuff down. I'm writing stuff down because Andre Lorde wrote stuff down, because James Baldwin wrote stuff down... and all the people who came before me -- set the stage for my work. I have to keep all of that in my heart as I move through the world, not only for the deep respect I have for them, but also for my own strength.

So my advice to other young writers: Read widely. Study other writers. Be thoughtful, Then go out and do the work of changing the form, finding your own voice, and saying what you need to say. Be fearless. And care.

The fact that young people continue to rise brings me such joy. They are where I look to find my hope.

-- "Continue to Rise: A Conversation with Jacqueline Woodson ~ Glory Edim

Every ego so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though is was a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares this delusion. ~ Hermann Hesse

Who can make sense of the roles we play? If I could draw any conclusion about the long, depressing slog of human progress, it's the possibility that unseen elements lie just on the other side of the physical universe and that somehow we're actors on the stage of the Globe, right across the Thames from a place called Pissing Alley, whether William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe are aware of our presence or not. ~ James Lee Burke

My metaphor for acting in movies - not on stage because it's completely different on stage - is to put colors on an easel for the director to paint his own painting with in the editing room, long after I've left. You buy me for red and black, so I better give you really great red and black, but if I can give you purple, pink, green and brown too, I will. ~ Scott Glenn

Doodles are not about performance; they are somewhere between practice and delving. ~ France Belleville-Van Stone

Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal, which Christ's religion illuminates with His divine light. ~ Franz Liszt

I wasn't happy with my performance at the World Championships in Daegu. I had an unbelievable race in the heats, but misjudged the semi and finished last. ~ Oscar Pistorius

I lived to be on stage, and I'm terrified. Terrified before every show. ~ Joan Rivers

I would be so curious to wire my brain up and see what's occurring when I act, because a performance is such a heightened state. I've always found that with doing theatre especially. It's so hard to come down. ~ Luke Kirby

When you do music concerts at Taj Mahal and the Acropolis, you have to be careful about your performance being appropriate with the place that surrounds you. It has to be appropriate to the culture - it should fit the building behind you, the environment you are playing it in and the culture of that place. ~ Yanni