Catharsis quotes:

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Catharsis comes from the ancient Greek word...which literally translated means 'to pass a hard stool' -- Tim Sandlin
Catharsis is about cleansing and healing at one and the same time - healing memories and attitudes, healing the spirit and the heart. -- Desmond Tutu
There's something about a catharsis that is very important. -- Glenn Close
The act of writing is a kind of catharsis, a liberation, but I never really concerned myself with that. I write because it interests me. -- Nathalie Sarraute
You get a show where people are jumping up and dancing, but it's not a critical event in the sense of profound catharsis. Essentially it's celebratory. -- Archie Shepp
The thing should have plot and character, beginning, middle and end. Arouse pity and then have a catharsis. Those were the best principles I was ever taught. -- Anne Rice
I didn't have a catharsis for my childhood pain, most of us don't, and until I learned how to forgive those people and let it go, I was unhappy. -- Tyler Perry
No movie has ever been able to provide a catharsis for the Holocaust, and I suspect none will ever be able to provide one for 9/11. Such subjects overwhelm art. -- Roger Ebert
Better still - your history has shown how powerful a moral catharsis expressed through popular resistance to injustice can sometimes be; I have in mind the grassroots opposition to the Vietnam War. -- Breyten Breytenbach
The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility. -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Catharsis isn't art. You can't rely on catharsis to get a laugh. Because guess what? People do laugh when something's shocking, but that is, to me, the absolute fakest of laughs. That's not something that sustains a television series, or a movie, or even 45 minutes of a stand-up set at Carolines. -- Mindy Kaling
Sometimes when we weep in the movies we weep for ourselves or for a life unlived. Or we even go to the movies because we want to resist the emotion that's there in front of us. I think there is always a catharsis that I look for and that makes the movie experience worthwhile. -- Edward Zwick
Art is a form of catharsis. -- Dorothy Parker
Catharsis isn't a wound being excavated from childhood. -- Sarah Ruhl
I don't write for catharsis; I have to write to understand. -- Joan Didion
Participants in dance, both dancers and viewers, may experience catharsis and develop a sense of mastery or self-discovery. -- Judith Lynne Hanna
And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming wild things. -- Maurice Sendak
If architecture is the history of all phallic emotion, the Empire State Building is utter catharsis, and we are sitting in its silhouette. -- Timothy Levitch
Catharsis returns us to the purpose for which were originally intended - to be called by God to do good - and thus ultimately returns us to ourselves. -- Desmond Tutu
A tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself . . . with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions. -- Aristotle
Opera once was an important social instrument - especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi, people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television. -- Luciano Berio
. . .from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things. -- Maurice Sendak
I've always loved singing and the catharsis of it. -- Autre Ne Veut
The interesting thing about acting is using all your own stuff and having some kind of personal catharsis while you're working. -- Melanie Lynskey
I sometimes think it's like a weird elastic band. The more tragic your work is, the quicker you snap back. There's a catharsis in telling a miserable old tale; you get rid of demons. -- Anne-Marie Duff
It's not that we like sad movies that make us feel like, 'Oh, my God, what a bummer.' We like emotionally moving experiences. It's nothing new. It's catharsis. It goes back to the Greeks. -- Gayle Forman
A movie can and should have some real dissonance throughout - rage, heartache, tears, conflict, catharsis and all the other elements Aristotle demanded of a good story - but the chord has to be resolved. -- Josh Radnor
I'm kind of a rebound junkie. So. when a relationship goes sour, I look at the sweetness in life elsewhere. So, I date a bit. The best catharsis is to write jokes and tell 4,000 people about it. -- Vir Das
My view of actors is that basically they're all harmless lunatics who'd be on the psychiatrist's couch, except that we get this sort of catharsis every six months or so, and we go and be absolutely someone else. -- Michael Caine
I've always had a little bit of darkness, and I've always been someone who was grieving. I had kind of had a tumultuous upbringing living in an abusive home, so for me, writing has always been a point of catharsis. -- Mary Lambert
There's a catharsis in cutting down trees. But there's absolutely none of that in picking cotton. It's maddening! It's fiddly, and it pricks your fingers, and it's something that's a very hard skill if you have no alacrity for it. -- Chiwetel Ejiofor
I love acting. It's the one job I know of where you can go in, go through complete catharsis - emotionally, physically sometimes and mentally - and at the end of the day say, 'See you in the pub, guys.' -- Peter Mullan
It's expected of novels that they should explain the world and create the illusion that things are ultimately logical and coherent. But that's not what I see around me. Often, events remain mysterious and unresolved, and our emotions reach no catharsis. -- Damon Galgut
I thought music could take you to a place where you didn't even feel ownership of it, you just felt lucky you were there. It's like church without God, or something. It's about feeling, hope and catharsis and things that are nurturing. -- Wesley Schultz
For me, fiction isn't very cathartic. It can be a broad, long catharsis, but it's a whole different thing - whereas music is physical. Essentially, it goes in through your ear. Fiction is cerebral, necessarily. It can do emotional stuff. But they don't really compare - not for me. -- John Darnielle
In a world where irony reigns, where you have to separate, protect and laugh at anything that is honest or has an emotional charge, I bet for catharsis. I like to invest emotionally in things. And catharsis, when it touches the emotional vein, can open the doors of even those who protect themselves. -- Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Bin Laden wasn't all that central to the terrorist network any more, but taking him down created a kind of national catharsis. It's been a really, really long time since we had something to celebrate that didn't involve a sports team. I'd rather it had been a non-death-related occasion, but we'll take what we can get. -- Gail Collins
I have a very healthy relationship to my work, and I find that if a scene is working, no matter how intense it is, you have the catharsis on screen, and you can let it go. I think it's, if at the end of the day you feel like you haven't cracked it, that's when you go home and it's more difficult to switch off. -- Cate Blanchett
Music is catharsis for me. -- Sara Bareilles
Art is a form of catharsis emotional release, purging, cleansing, purifying. -- Dorothy Parker
I just think that, at the end of the day, you needed the catharsis of revelation. -- Greg Bryk
I always said it kept me alive - photography - because it did. It was my catharsis. -- Bruce Gilden
Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, endâ?¦crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis (nomads). -- Khaled Hosseini
I don't feel that catharsis in a play necessarily takes place during the course of a play. Often it should take place afterward. -- Edward Albee
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Knowing about comedy has helped me with the drama. To see people laugh, it's like there are moments of catharsis in the middle of sadness. -- Steve Coogan
God, it was good to let go, let the tight mask fall off, and the bewildered, chaotic fragments pour out. It was the purge, the catharsis. -- Sylvia Plath
As for the healing, that comes from the writing, from living and writing. That's my catharsis. That's why I never regret sharing because it's part of my healing! -- Karrine Steffans
Good practice, everyone," Rusty said at last. "Light on the actual learning, heavy on the emotional catharsis, and thanks to Jared I think I need a rabies shot, but them's the breaks. -- Sarah Rees Brennan

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