Arthur Miller: Living

“Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

Source: The Crucible (1953)
Context: Danforth: Do you mean to deny this confession when you are free?
Proctor: I mean to deny nothing!
Danforth: Then explain to me, Mr. Proctor, why you will not let —
Proctor: [With the cry of his whole soul] Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!

Life , Lie , Soul

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

Arthur Miller

Wise , Positive , Life

“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.

“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

“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

“A playwright lives in an occupied country… And if you can't live that way you don't stay.”

Arthur Miller

The New York Times (9 Feb 1986)

Way , Country

“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.”

Arthur Miller

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

World

“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.”

Arthur Miller

Lyman, Act 2
The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991)

Girl , Intelligence , Housing

“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.”

Arthur Miller

"It Could Happen Here - And Did," http://books.google.com/books?id=SxkSdaCoHL8C&pg=PA295&dq=%22arthur+miller%22+%22panic+button%22&ei=E4VoR9-SMI34iwHf9LFo&ie=ISO-8859-1&sig=f0iKJxpOGjd5_Zs83QcNtAWLpH0 New York Times (30 April 1967); also in The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (1996)

Training