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melodrama
in a sentence

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  • He quirks his eyebrows and adds, with a touch of melodrama, "To decide our fate."†   (source)
  • You make me feel like a villain in a melodrama — twirling my mustache while I try to steal some poor girl's virtue.†   (source)
  • At the California Labor School a forceful and perceptive teacher quickly and unceremoniously separated me from melodrama.†   (source)
  • She was an innocent four-year-old caught amid the cruel realities of a strange, clouded marriage that somehow I still did not quite understand how became a melodrama, a sideshow in the unfathomable course of worldwide political events.†   (source)
  • How could I admit my part in the current melodrama to a psyche devoid of guilt?†   (source)
  • (With a tremendous and rather insincere sense of melodrama) 'Course I thinks it's wonderful how our folks keeps on pushing out.†   (source)
  • "But then," Yolanda says in the ominous voice of a radio melodrama, "then Papi found the letters."†   (source)
  • They humped and scuttled through the shadows, hump-lurched with hands dragging, and you can always convince yourself it's okay to laugh at cripples and mutants if everybody else is laughing, it's a way to play off your aversion, and it wasn't just the twisted features and elaborate gestures and the curious sort of lip-gloss effect you've noticed on the faces of male actors in silent movies but the music as well, this was pretty broad too—string sections of soaring melodrama.†   (source)
  • For an observer given to melodrama it would have appeared that the woman's look was pleading.†   (source)
  • And what he says next isn't self-pity or angst or melodrama.†   (source)
  • I remember Grandma Kato as thin and tough, not given to melodrama or overstatement of any kind.†   (source)
  • The groom, a virtual prisoner of his future fatherin-law, was settled into one of the numerous guest rooms, where he spent his time pacing the floor with nothing to do, without seeing Blanca, and not understanding how he had ended up in this melodrama.†   (source)
  • High-concept melodrama.†   (source)
  • Enough with this melodrama.†   (source)
  • Insane Radchaai ships were a staple of melodrama, inside and outside Radchaai space.†   (source)
  • I would like to be able to say, with trite and silly melodrama, that I am sorry that my father did not live to see his son's name on a book.†   (source)
  • Too many melodramas all turned up to max.†   (source)
  • It's no credit to me or Aunt Loma that we were enjoying our roles in this melodrama.†   (source)
  • I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom; I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere, a climate of intemperance, rhetoric, and feverish melodrama.†   (source)
  • At this, Nicolo drew himself up, blushed, and announced in the manner of a police agent in a melodrama revealing himself to a group of saboteurs, "I am a Communist."†   (source)
  • Their words were not mawkish melodrama; they meant what they said.†   (source)
  • Melodrama, action, violence.†   (source)
  • Deaths and disclosures, universal and particular, denouements both unexpected and inexorable, transvestite melodrama on all levels including the suggestive.†   (source)
  • I had come to Brooklyn ostensibly "to write my guts out," as dear old Farrell had put it, not to play the hapless supernumerary in some tortured melodrama.†   (source)
  • When war began I followed the news as melodrama.†   (source)
  • The subject is a difficult one to treat frankly without appearing to sink into petty fault-finding or name-calling or, worse, melodrama, and, worse yet, cheap expose.†   (source)
  • But Rufo is as full of dire forebodings as a cheap melodrama.†   (source)
  • Who wants these melodramas?†   (source)
  • I'm tired of this melodrama, I'm tired of keeping silent.†   (source)
  • 7, and that wasn't exactly the stuff of which high melodrama was made.†   (source)
  • I must resist melodrama, and an overheated brain.†   (source)
  • There was too much melodrama in it — too much luck, both bad and good.†   (source)
  • Now jokiness had made way for melodrama, or plaintiveness.†   (source)
  • The public will always prefer a salacious melodrama to a bald tale of mere thievery.†   (source)
  • The melodrama of the expression does not diminish the emotion, at least not for her.†   (source)
  • But how can I when she won't say she's sorry, or even admit her role in this melodrama?†   (source)
  • Forgive the melodrama, but there really is no other way to show what the naked eye cannot see.†   (source)
  • So why rehearse this melodrama even in my mind?†   (source)
  • It was melodrama so overdone that he and Crake would have laughed their heads off at it, if they'd been fourteen and watching it on DVD.†   (source)
  • There was no sense of parody or melodrama in this act, no symbolism or hidden intention; it was merely the automatic reaction of a priest who had said Mass almost daily for more than forty-six years of his life and who now faced the prospect of never again participating in the reassuring ritual of that celebration.†   (source)
  • Sylvie had decided to ignore the antics as yet another Kohlerian melodrama, but she began to get concerned when Kohler failed to return at the proper time for his daily injections; the director's physical condition required regular treatment, and when he decided to push his luck, the results were never pretty-respiratory shock, coughing fits, and a mad dash by the infirmary personnel.†   (source)
  • Her temper had not diminished with the passing of time, and when a passionate nature is not eased with moments of compassion, melodrama is likely to take the stage.†   (source)
  • At the moment of her climax — which she attempts to disguise as pain — she always says no. In addition, she implies, by her shrinking and clinging, her abject imploring, that she's offering him her body as a kind of payment — something she owes him in return for the money he's spent on her behalf, as in some overdone melodrama featuring evil bankers and virtuous but penniless maidens.†   (source)
  • Cordelia's melodramas are beyond her.†   (source)
  • People say all the time, with trite and silly melodrama, that someone, by their actions and clear thinking, saved their life.†   (source)
  • Maybe it would just be melodrama, a skin-deep slash or two, her old theatricality; though perhaps theatrical people are not less risky, but more.†   (source)
  • The mechanics of cheap melodrama!†   (source)
  • Craftily, ruefully, squinting up from under his eyebrows at his troubled life, Will Hodge Sr recognized that the cage was there, understood it as one understands that someday one will no doubt die--that one might, if one were a twenty-year-old poet or a fool, make howling melodrama of it, but the fact would remain no more than it was, for all one's howling--an indifferent limit, a wall closing out what a man who had business to attend to had no good reason to be curious about.†   (source)
  • "Fate brought me to you," she went on, not unaware of the melodrama of the utterance, "because I knew only you would understand."†   (source)
  • I extract significance from melodrama, a significance which it does not in fact contain; but occasionally, from out of this matter, there escapes a thin beam of light that, seen at the right angle, can crack the shell of mortality.†   (source)
  • For within these confessions it will be discovered that we really have no acquaintance with true evil; the evil portrayed in most novels and plays and movies is mediocre if not spurious, a shoddy concoction generally made up of violence, fantasy, neurotic terror and melodrama.†   (source)
  • This story, too, she had squirreled away for such a moment, relying on the theory that while a pragmatic mind like that of Hoss might appreciate the venom of the Antisemitismus in the abstract, that same mind's more primitive side would likely relish a touch of melodrama.†   (source)
  • In other words the tragedy ought to have been a comedy, or perhaps a melodrama.†   (source)
  • But I have had enough melodrama in this life, and would willingly give my five senses if they could ensure us our present peace and security.†   (source)
  • The heavy melodrama of some of the scenes was unhackneyed to them: they bent eagerly to the apple-shooting scene, and the escape by boat.†   (source)
  • You are like one of the heroes of those silly melodramas mother used to be so fond of acting in.†   (source)
  • Maggie always departed with raised spirits from the showing places of the melodrama.†   (source)
  • And I don't have any of the fine melodrama of fiction: the dictagraphs and speeches by torchlight.†   (source)
  • Above a marsh red-winged blackbirds chased a crow in a swift melodrama of the air.†   (source)
  • I have nothing but my good right arm, as they say in the melodramas.†   (source)
  • He was clever in melodrama too, but too broad—too broad.†   (source)
  • "Where is ' H.R. Jacob's'?" interrupted Carrie, mentioning one of the theatres devoted to melodrama which went by that name at the time.†   (source)
  • There was a moment of gorgeous abandon, a flash of melodrama such as he found in traffic-driving, when he laid out a clean collar, discovered that it was frayed in front, and tore it up with a magnificent yeeeeeing sound.†   (source)
  • With downcast eyes, so to speak, he accomplished this with a few silent, deft movements; and when he sat down to listen again, it was the last scene of the melodrama that he heard: the final duet of Radames and Aida, sung at the bottom of their crypt, while above their heads bigoted, cruel priests, raising and spreading their hands in the ceremonies of their cult, lifted their voices in a dull murmur.†   (source)
  • Jude found himself speaking out loud, holding conversations with them as it were, like an actor in a melodrama who apostrophizes the audience on the other side of the footlights; till he suddenly ceased with a start at his absurdity.†   (source)
  • With the attitude he might have held toward an amusing melodrama he hoped it would be long and bloody.†   (source)
  • Our newspapers and melodramas are blustering about our imperial destiny; but our eyes and hearts turn eagerly to the American millionaire.†   (source)
  • It is melodrama; but I can't help it.†   (source)
  • Nobody does: the successes such plays sometimes obtain are due to the incidental conventional melodrama with which the experienced popular author instinctively saves himself from failure.†   (source)
  • As delineated by Mr. Daly, it was true to the most sacred traditions of melodrama as he found it when he began his career.†   (source)
  • Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, just as you did on earth; but here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama.†   (source)
  • Robert Macaire is the hero of two favorite melodramas—"Chien de Montargis" and "Chien d'Aubry"—and the name is applied to bold criminals as a term of derision.†   (source)
  • CHAPTER XVII OLIVER'S DESTINY CONTINUING UNPROPITIOUS, BRINGS A GREAT MAN TO LONDON TO INJURE HIS REPUTATION 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 bacon.†   (source)
  • Take a few steps, and you come upon that fatal Rue Croulebarbe, where Ulbach stabbed the goat-girl of Ivry to the sound of thunder, as in the melodramas.†   (source)
  • …and not being able to elicit the facts he needed, he left his frogs and rabbits to some repose under their trying and mysterious dispensation of unexplained shocks, and went to finish his evening at the theatre of the Porte Saint Martin, where there was a melodrama which he had already seen several times; attracted, not by the ingenious work of the collaborating authors, but by an actress whose part it was to stab her lover, mistaking him for the evil-designing duke of the piece.†   (source)
  • The most vicious man in the play is not in the least a stage villain; indeed, he regards his own moral character with the sincere complacency of a hero of melodrama.†   (source)
  • Then they began to discuss a melodrama that they had seen on the preceding evening at the Gaite Theatre.†   (source)
  • No author who has ever known the exultation of sending the Press into an hysterical tumult of protest, of moral panic, of involuntary and frantic confession of sin, of a horror of conscience in which the power of distinguishing between the work of art on the stage and the real life of the spectator is confused and overwhelmed, will ever care for the stereotyped compliments which every successful farce or melodrama elicits from the newspapers.†   (source)
  • This Mr Crummles did in the highest style of melodrama, pouring forth at the same time all the most dismal forms of farewell he could think of, out of the stock pieces.†   (source)
  • In one line by itself was an announcement of the first night of a new melodrama; in another line by itself was an announcement of the last six nights of an old one; a third line was devoted to the re-engagement of the unrivalled African Knife-swallower, who had kindly suffered himself to be prevailed upon to forego his country engagements for one week longer; a fourth line announced that Mr Snittle Timberry, having recovered from his late severe indisposition, would have the honour of…†   (source)
  • What! because it would have pleased me to play the grand and generous; this is melodrama, after all; because I should have thought of no one but myself, the idea! for the sake of saving from a punishment, a trifle exaggerated, perhaps, but just at bottom, no one knows whom, a thief, a good-for-nothing, evidently, a whole country-side must perish! a poor woman must die in the hospital! a poor little girl must die in the street! like dogs; ah, this is abominable!†   (source)
  • Cosette, terrified by the melodrama improvised by Toussaint, and possibly, also, by the recollection of the apparitions of the past week, which recurred to her memory, dared not even say to her: "Go and look at the stone which has been placed on the bench!" for fear of opening the garden gate and allowing "the men" to enter.†   (source)
  • I had been inclined at first to take this whole remarkable misadventure as melodrama; such things just did not happen in real life.†   (source)
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