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Arthur Miller Quotes
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Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright, essayist, and a controversial figure in the twentieth-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are All My Sons , Death of a Salesman , The Crucible and A View from the Bridge . He wrote several screenplays and was most noted for his work on The Misfits . The drama Death of a Salesman has been numbered on the short list of finest American plays in the 20th century.

Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was married to Marilyn Monroe. In 1980, Miller received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. He received the Prince of Asturias Award, the Praemium Imperiale prize in 2002 and the Jerusalem Prize in 2003, as well as the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 1999. Wikipedia  

✵ 17. October 1915 – 10. February 2005
Arthur Miller photo
Arthur Miller: 147   quotes 168   likes

Arthur Miller Quotes

“A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.”

Arthur Miller

As quoted in The Observer [London] (26 November 1961)

“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!”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

Source: The Crucible

Children , Law

“After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Willy
Death of a Salesman (1949)
Source: Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman

Training , Dead

“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.”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Source: Death of a Salesman

Understanding

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

Arthur Miller The Crucible

Source: The Crucible

Peace , Change

“A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse.”

Arthur Miller

“He have his goodness now, God forbid I take it from him!”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

Elizabeth Proctor
Source: The Crucible (1953)

God

“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.”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

Source: The Crucible

Dreams , Sleep , Housing

“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.”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Linda
Death of a Salesman (1949)
Context: 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.

“Sex, sin, and the Devil were early linked.”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

Source: The Crucible

Sex

“I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.”

Arthur Miller All My Sons

Source: All My Sons

Men

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

Arthur Miller The Crucible

Source: The Crucible (1953)
Context: Proctor: You will not judge me more, Elizabeth. I have good reason to think before I charge fraud on Abigail, and I will think on it. Let you look to your own improvement before you go to judge your husband any more. I have forgot Abigail, and —
Elizabeth: And I.
Proctor: Spare me! You forget nothin' and forgive nothin.' Learn charity, woman. I have gone tiptoe in this house all seven months since she is gone. I have not moved from there to here without I think to please you, and still an everlasting funeral marches round your heart. I cannot speak but I am doubted, every moment judged for lies, as though I come into a court when I come into this house!
Elizabeth: I do not judge you. The magistrate sits in your heart that judges you. I never thought you but a good man, John — only somewhat bewildered.
Proctor: Oh, Elizabeth, your justice would freeze beer!

Justice , Beer

“We cannot look to superstition in this. The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone.”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

Reverend John Hale
Source: The Crucible (1953)

“Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Ben
Death of a Salesman (1949)
Source: Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman

Way , Boy , Fight

“See, Biff, everybody around me is so false that I'm constantly lowering my ideals…”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Source: Death of a Salesman

Falseness

“Will you let me go for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Source: Death of a Salesman

Dreams , Christ

“That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?”

Arthur Miller

His reply to a shoe manufacturer who had asked why Miller's job should be subsidized when his was not, as recounted at a London press conference. The Guardian (25 January 1990)

Question

“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!”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

Elizabeth Proctor
The Crucible (1953)

Love , Kiss , Housing

“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.”

Arthur Miller

Commenting on After the Fall (1964) in The Saturday Evening Post (1 February 1964)

Knowledge , Tree

“Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.”

Arthur Miller

Life (7 February 1964)

Life , Game

“An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.”

Arthur Miller

"The Year it Came Apart" http://books.google.com/books?id=MekCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA30, New York magazine, Vol. 8, No. 1 (30 December 1974 – 6 January 1975), p. 30

“Theology, sir, is a fortress; no crack in a fortress may be accounted small.”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

John Hale
The Crucible (1953)

“Personality always wins the day.”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Willy
Death of a Salesman (1949)

Personality

“Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?”

Arthur Miller After the Fall

Foreword
After the Fall (1964)

“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.”

Arthur Miller

Marxism Today (January 1988)

Shoe , Failure

“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…”

Arthur Miller

Leo in I Can't Remember Anything in Danger: Memory! : Two Plays (1987)

“If I see an ending, I can work backward.”

Arthur Miller

The New York Times (9 Feb 1986)

“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.”

Arthur Miller

Collected Plays (1958) Introduction, Section 1

Life

“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!”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

Abigail Williams
The Crucible (1953)

Parent , Sun , Night

“Hale: There is a prodigious fear of this court in the country —
Danforth: Then there is a prodigious guilt in the country. Are you afraid to be questioned here?
Hale: I may only fear the Lord, sir, but there is fear in the country nevertheless.
Danforth: Reproach me not with the fear in the country; there is fear in the country because there is a moving plot to topple Christ in the country!
Hale: But it does not follow that everyone accused is part of it.
Danforth: No uncorrupted man may fear this court, Mr. Hale!”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

The Crucible (1953)

Fear , Question , Christ , Parting

“You cut your life down for spite!”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Willy
Death of a Salesman (1949)

Life

“I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.”

Arthur Miller

After being refused a passport for his supposed disloyalty. The New York Herald Tribune (31 March 1954)

“The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.”

Arthur Miller

The New York Times (9 May 1984)

Life

“Work a lifetime to pay off a house — You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it.”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Willy
Death of a Salesman (1949)

Housing

“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.”

Arthur Miller

Tragedy and the Common Man (1949)

Fear , Star , Question , Nature

“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.”

Arthur Miller

The New York Times (9 May 1984)

Season

“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.”

Arthur Miller

On filming a television production of Death of a Salesman, as quoted in The New York Times (15 September 1985) http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9805E2DE133BF936A2575AC0A963948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

Feeling , Problem , Housing , Personality

“Wonderful coffee. Meal in itself”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Willy
Death of a Salesman (1949)

Coffee

“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.”

Arthur Miller book Death of a Salesman

Willy
Death of a Salesman (1949)

Boy

“We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealment.”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

Deputy Governor Danforth
The Crucible (1953)

“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.”

Arthur Miller

On Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, as quoted in The New York Times (9 May 1984)

Understanding

“Without alienation, there can be no politics.”

Arthur Miller

Marxism Today (January 1988)