Melissa Leo Quotes

The darker, more complex and emotional the part is, the easier it is for me. But I don't take any of that stuff home with me at the end of the day.

I'm kind of weird - I don't get excited. Sometimes I fake that I'm excited just to make people happy.

Character and emotionality don't always have to be relegated to quieter, more simple constructs.

When you try to cool down hot emotions, what tends to happen is that you end up either repressing them or losing them altogether. Neither is desirable. Without emotion, much social interaction loses its meaning or changes for the worse.

I have a lot of aggression in me that needs to come out in a not-very-precise or articulate way.

I'm not an emotional person; I keep it in, and I wouldn't know how to get it out if it weren't for acting and writing.

I can't show, let alone share, my emotions. In fact, I've kept it all locked up within myself all my life. Yeah, it's a problem, especially when it comes to relationships with the people close to me.

Shadow had heard too many people telling each other not to repress their feelings, to let their emotions out, let the pain go. Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn't feel anything at all.

She's letting out her feelings. The scary thing is not being able to do that. When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you're in big trouble.

But the absence of tears wasn't the same as an absence of feeling.

I am a quiet man. I tend to think things through and try not to say too much. But here I am, saying perhaps too much. But there are these feelings inside me which need badly to escape, I guess. And this makes me feel relieved because one of my big concerns these past few years is that I've been losing my ability to feel things with the same intensity- the way I felt when I was younger. It's scary- to feel your emotions floating away and just not caring. I guess what's really scary is not caring about the loss.

Sometimes acting, particularly in film, can feel so contained. You need to be small and not overplay things, so it's such a relief to be able to go as far as you can go with an emotion or a feeling or a speech.

I've written this to keep from crying. But I am crying, only the tears won't come.

And I am the kind of person that feels so much that if I didn’t have acting (and music), I would burst from all of the emotion inside!

Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted because I can't print the results

I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

I don't cry in real life. I'm just pretty light and I don't get too heavy.

He does not like showing his feelings and would rather do a cruel thing than open his heart freely.

I actually feel something in my chest open, a feeling so intense, it’s like my heart’s about to burst. And I just let it. I just let it out.

Laughter isn't even the other side of tears. It is tears turned inside out. Truly the suffering is great, here on earth.

When you lock everything down tight so that the pain can't get out, you also keep good stuff from getting in.

Villains are not fun for me to play, as such. But caricature-ish, intense behaviors that are based on real human traits are interesting. That makes an interesting story.

I didn’t want to be prideful anymore. I wanted to be as hard as and brittle as the stones I carted into the woods. Stones that could not feel or cry or see. I wished not to feel anything at all. In no time, what I wished for, I became.

Allow yourself to release the emotions you have struggled all your life to contain.