Quotes from book

Death of a Salesman

“Sit down, Willy.”

“We're free and clear, Willy. We're free, we're free, we're free…”

“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?”

“I'm very well liked in Hartford. You know, the trouble is, Linda, people don't seem to take to me.”

“Nothing's Planted, I don't have a thing in the ground.”

“Spite, spite, is the word of your undoing!”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“Wonderful coffee. Meal in itself”

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

“You cut your life down for spite!”

“Personality always wins the day.”

“Isn't that — isn't that remarkable? Biff — he likes me!”

“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.”

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

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

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