Arthur Miller Quotes

I look for John Proctor that took me from my sleep and put knowledge in my heart! I never knew what pretence Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons I was taught by all these Christian women and their covenanted men! And now you bid me tear the light out of my eyes! I will not, I cannot! You loved me, John Proctor, and whatever sin it is, you love me yet!

It is always and forever the same struggle: to perceive somehow our own complicity with evil is a horror not to be borne. … much more reassuring to see the world in terms of totally innocent victims and totally evil instigators of the monstrous violence we see all about us. At all costs, never disturb our innocence. But what is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all. The perfection of innocence, indeed, is madness.

Now, as the weeks passed, there was a future, there was a trouble that would not go away.

I am bewildered by the death of love. And my responsibility for it.

Man, remember, until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.

"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."

Mother: What more can we be?

Chris: You can be better! Once and for all you can know there's a universe of people outside and you're responsible to it, and unless you know that you threw away your son because that's how he died.

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.

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.

There are wheels within wheels in this village, and fires within fires!

My argument with so much of psychoanalysis, is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness, when in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people's suffering; that the problem is not to undo suffering or to wipe it off the face of the earth but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to cure ourselves of it constantly and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call "happiness." There's too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go. It's part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad.

You want to live? You better figure out your life.

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

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