Arthur Miller

“Show them a stony heart and sink them with it”

“MAGGIE, in pain: That’s what I mean; I’m a joke to most people.QUENTIN: No, it’s that you say what you mean, Maggie. You don’t seem to be upholding anything, you’re not—ashamed of what you are.MAGGIE: W-what do you mean, of what I am?… But you didn’t, did you?He turns to her in agony.Laugh at me?QUENTIN: No. He suddenly stands and cries out to Listener. Fraud! From the first five minutes! …Because! I should have agreed she was a joke, a beautiful piece, trying to take herself seriously! Why did I lie to her, play this cheap benefactor, this— Listens, and now unwillingly he turns back to her.MAGGIE: Like when you told me to fix where my dress was torn? You wanted me to be— proud of myself. Didn’t you?”

“Pray calm yourselves. I have eleven children, and I am twenty-six times a grandma, and I have seen them all through their silly seasons, and when it come on them they will run the Devil bowlegged keeping up with their mischief. I think she'll wake when she tires of it. A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.”

“I personally think that what the big (writers) have in common is a fierce moral sensibility, which is unquenchable and they are all burning with the same anger at the way the world is.The little ones have made a peace with it, and the bigger ones can't make any peace.”

“I only ask you one thing- don't trust nobody”

“Because most people ain't people.”

“الأديب دائماً في تعب وكرب، ولا يقتصر هذا على ما يحدث أثناء قيامه بالكتابة أو لأنه يكتب، إن التعب والكرب يلازمان الكاتب في كل شأن من شؤون الحياة، في الزواج، والمعاملات الخارجية، والمال، وكل شيء”

“When it is recalled that until the Christian era the underworld was never regardded as a hostile area, that all gods were useful and essentially friendly to man despite occasional lapsesl when we see the steady methodical inculcation into humanity of the idea of man's worthlesseness - until redeemed - the necessity of the Devil may become evident as a weapon, a weapon designed and used time and time again in every age to whip men into a surrender to a particular church or church state.”

“[W]e conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable view of cosmology. Ours is a divided empire in which certain ideas and emotions and actions are of God, and their opposites are of Lucifer. It is as impossible for most men to conceive of a morality without sin as of an earth without 'sky'. Since 1692 a great but superficial change has wiped out God's beard and the Devil's horns, but the world is still gripped between two diametrically opposed absolutes. The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon - such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.”

“There is prodigious fear in seeking loose spirits”

“it's the proper morning to fly into Hell.”

“The enemy is within, and within stays within, and we can’t get out of within.”

“Great stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay. They say he give them but two words. "More weight," he says. And died.”

“It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves”

“Just remember, kid, you can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away.”

“Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.”

“I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw — the sky. I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time time to sit and smoke. And I looked at the pen and said to myself, what the hell am I grabbing this for? 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! Why can't I say that, Willy?”

“Well, I spent six or seven years after high school trying to work myself up. Shipping clerk, salesman, business of one kind or another. And it's a measly manner of existence. To get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying. To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off. And always to have to get ahead of the next fella. And still — that's how you build a future.”

“Sometimes...it's better for a man just to walk away.But if you can't walk away?I guess that's when it's tough.”

“The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.”

“If you believe that life is worth living then your belief will create the fact.”

“...an everlasting funeral marches round your heart.”

“He plough on Sunday, Sir.Plough on Sunday?!”

“Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it.”

“I am amazed all over again by how magnified this project's importance has become, far beyond its being a play or an artwork. It is now a test of some kind; but of what, precisely? The incommunicability of the Chinese? If I can't claim to know my actors, I know them as well or as little as I would an American cast. I can no longer call up the notion of Chinese mysteriousness.”

“The train resembles the Soviet type and is quite comfortable, but all socialist structures I have ever encountered have toilets stemming from a single model engineered by the Orthodox Church in Tsarist Russia to ensure that man never be allowed to forget the corruption of the flesh.”

“Property breeds lawyers, I said, forbearing to add a belief that unfortunately property now seemed the only thing palpable enough to demand the respect of governments, and perhaps was the generating clout against encroachments on the spiritual protections for speech, assembly, and so on. It might turn out that without the right to possess we are not sure we really have the right to speak and to be.”

“In moments of exhaustion, I think for some reason of writing an autobiography--proper work for tired artists--but every autobiographer must secretly believe he has triumphed in life. Maybe, incidentally, this accounts for the paucity of women's autobiographies--they know better.”

“The closer they come to transcending technique and the memorization of lines--the closer to really beginning to act, in short--the more Chinese they begin to seem. Happy now approaches Miss Forsythe to pick her up in the restaurant with a wonderful formality, his back straight, head high, his hand-gestures even more precise and formal, but with a comic undertone that ironically comes closer to conveying the original American idea of the scene than when he was trying to be physically sloppy and "relaxed"--that is, imitating an American. I think that by some unplanned magic we may end up creating something not quite American or Chinese but a pure style springing from the heart of the play itself--the play as a nonnational event, that is, a human circumstance.”

“On the day the world is blown up, the playwright whose show opened the night before will be leafing past the news section of the Times to find his review--as he ascends through the stratosphere, oblivious.”

“You are pulling down heaven and raising up a whore”

“Oh,Elizabeth, your justice would freeze beer.”

“Willy Loman: I don't want change, I want Swiss cheese!”

“I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it.”

“Peace. It is a providence, and no great change; we are only what we always were, but naked now.”

“What work you do! It's strange work for a Christian girl to hang old women!”

“A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.”

“Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be … when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am.”

“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!”

“It's a measly manner of existence. To get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying. To suffer fifty weeks of the year for a two week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off. And still-that's how you build a future.”

“most of the time we settle for half and i like it better, even as i know how wrong he was and his death useless, i tremble for i confess that something peversley pure calls to me from his memory”

“Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.”

“Chris: I don't know why it is, but every time I reach out for something I want, I have to pull back because other people will suffer.”

“A man is not a bird, to come and go with the springtime.”

“I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I'd find you comin' through the door.”

“I don't say he's a great man. Willie 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 in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”

“Pop, I'm nothing! I'm nothing, Pop. Can't you understand that? There's no spite in it any more. I'm just what I am, that's all.”

“I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been.”

“Willy: I am building something with this firm, Ben, and if a man is building something he must be on the right track, mustn't he?Ben: What are you building? Lay your hand on it. where is it?Willy [hesitantly]: That's true, Linda, there's nothing.”

“Charley: He won't starve. None a them starve. Forget about him.Willy: Then what have I got to remember?”