All Quotes by Arthur Miller
“The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.”
“Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.”
“I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.”
“I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.”
“The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.”
“The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.”
“By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.”
“A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance — you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.”
“A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.”
“The best of our theater is standing on tiptoe, striving to see over the shoulders of father and mother. The worst is exploiting and wallowing in the self-pity of adolescence and obsessive keyhole sexuality. The way out, as the poet says, is always through.”
“I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play — but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.”
“The job is to ask questions — it always was — and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.”
“The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.”
“Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.”
“A playwright … is … the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great.”
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
“You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.”
“It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves”
“When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die. … No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion.”
“The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.”
“I understand his longing for immortality … Willy's writing his name in a cake of ice on a hot day, but he wishes he were writing in stone.”
“He wants to live on through something — and in his case, his masterpiece is his son… all of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world.”
“The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.”
“The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down…. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality.”
“In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks … on screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera. The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes. It isn't easy to do in the theater, but it's twice as hard in film.”
“If I see an ending, I can work backward.”
“A playwright lives in an occupied country… And if you can't live that way you don't stay.”
“Well, all the plays that I was trying to write … were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.”
“I figure I've done what I could do, more or less, and now I'm going back to being a chemical; all we are is a lot of talking nitrogen, you know...”
“The Crucible became by far my most frequently produced play, both abroad and at home. Its meaning is somewhat different in different places and moments. I can almost tell what the political situation in a country is when the play is suddenly a hit there — it is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past.”
“If I have any justification for having lived it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that.”
“Without alienation, there can be no politics.”
“I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.”
“That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?”
“Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.”
“An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.”
“I'm a fatalist. … I consider I am rejected in principle. My work is and, through my work, I am. If it's accepted, it's miraculous or the result of a misunderstanding.”
“I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of anything.”
“Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.”
“They don't need me in New York. I'm the New England man. I'm vital in New England.”
“I simply asked him if he was making any money. Is that a criticism?”
“I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life.”
“I'm very well liked in Hartford. You know, the trouble is, Linda, people don't seem to take to me.”
“Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.”
“I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.”
“A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.”
“Personality always wins the day.”
“Sit down, Willy.”
“The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that.”
“You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away — a man is not a piece of fruit.”
“After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.”
“Work a lifetime to pay off a house — You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it.”
“Ben, that funeral will be massive! They'll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire! All the old-timers with the strange license plates — that boy will be thunderstruck, Ben, because he never realized — I am known! Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey — I am known, Ben, and he'll see it with his eyes once and for all.”
“Spite, spite, is the word of your undoing!”
“You cut your life down for spite!”
“Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!”
“Isn't that — isn't that remarkable? Biff — he likes me!”
“And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. 'Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?”
“Wonderful coffee. Meal in itself”
“Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.”
“Nothing's Planted, I don't have a thing in the ground.”
“We're free and clear, Willy. We're free, we're free, we're free...”
“In this age few tragedies are written. It has often been held that the lack is due to a paucity of heroes among us, or else that modern man has had the blood drawn out of his organs of belief by the skepticism of science, and the heroic attack on life cannot feed on an attitude of reserve and circumspection. For one reason or another, we are often held to be below tragedy — or tragedy above us.”
“The tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself. The wrong is the condition which suppresses man, perverts the flowing out of his love and creative instinct. Tragedy enlightens — and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies.”
“Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect. No tragedy can therefore come about when its author fears to question absolutely everything, when he regards any institution, habit or custom as being either everlasting, immutable or inevitable. In the tragic view the need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star, and whatever it is that hedges his nature and lowers it is ripe for attack and examination.”
“Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you. And you know I can do it; I saw Indians smash my dear parents' heads on the pillow next to mine, and I have seen some reddish work done at night, and I can make you wish you had never seen the sun go down!”
“Abby, I may think of you softly from time to time. But I'll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.”
“A child's spirit is like a child, you cannot catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.”
“We cannot look to superstition in this. The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone.”
“There are wheels within wheels in this village, and fires within fires!”
“I have trouble enough without I come five mile to hear him preach only hellfire and bloody damnation. Take it to heart, Mr. Parris. There are many others who stay away from church these days because you hardly ever mention God any more.”
“I'll plead no more! I see now your spirit twists around the single error of my life, and I will never tear it free!”
“I like it not that Mr. Parris should lay his hand upon my baby. I see no light of God in that man. I'll not conceal it.”
“Theology, sir, is a fortress; no crack in a fortress may be accounted small.”
“Though our own hearts break, we cannot flinch; these are new times, sir. There is a misty plot afoot so subtle we should be criminal to cling to old respect and ancient friendships. I have seen too many frightful proofs in court — the Devil is alive in Salem, and we dare not quail to follow wherever the accusing finger points!”
“Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers? I'll tell you what's walking Salem — vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law! This warrant's vengeance! I'll not give my wife to vengeance!”
“Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our old pretense is ripped away. Aye, and God's icy wind will blow.”
“We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealment.”
“A person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time — we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.”
“A fire, a fire is burning! I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face, and yours, Danforth! For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as you quail now when you know in all your black hearts that this be fraud — God damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together!”
“You're pulling heaven down, and raising up a whore!”
“I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self.”
“It is mistaken law that leads you to sacrifice. Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it. I beg you, woman, prevail upon your husband to confess. Let him give his lie. Quail not before God's judgment in this, for it may well be God damns a liar less than he that throws his life away for pride.”
“John, I counted myself so plain, so poorly made, no honest love could come to me! Suspicion kissed you when I did; I never knew how I should say my love. It were a cold house I kept!”
“I do think I see some shred of goodness in John Proctor. Not enough to weave a banner with, but white enough to keep it from such dogs. Give them no tear! Tears pleasure them! Show honor now, show a stony heart and sink them with it!”
“Who weeps for these, weeps for corruption!”
“He have his goodness now, God forbid I take it from him!”
“Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?”
“I am bewildered by the death of love. And my responsibility for it.”
“I saw clearly only when I saw with love. Or can one ever remember love? It's like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume. And that's the truth of roses, isn't it? — The perfume?”
“I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match.”
“Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.”
“Look, we're all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house — in the bedroom he's asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he's rolling around with some bareass girl, in the library he's paying his taxes, in the yard he's raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he's making a bomb to blow it all up.”
“The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.”
“An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted.”