Arthur Miller Quotes

Show them a stony heart and sink them with it

to go, Pop. Every muscle is ready. WILLY [at the edge of the apron]: You realize what

كانت تعتقد أن معظم المتزوجين لم يتزوجوا عن حب ، وإنما لكي يجد كل منهم تبريراً لدى الآخر

When one rises above the individual villainy displayed, one can only pity them all, just as we shall be pitied some day.

When it is recalled that until the Christian era the underworld was never regarded as a hostile area, that all gods were useful and essentially friendly to man despite occasional lapses; when we see the steady and methodical inculcation into humanity of the idea of man’s worthlessness — 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.

Figure it out. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there's nobody o live in it.

Eddie Carbone had never expected to have a destiny. A man works, raises his family, goes bowling, eats, gets old, and then he dies. Now, as the weeks passed, there was a future, there was a trouble that would not go away.

Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from.

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?

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.

I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match.

I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self. One day the house smells of fresh bread, the next of smoke and blood. One day you faint because the gardener cuts his finger off, within a week you're climbing over corpses of children bombed in a subway. What hope can there be if that is so? I tried to die near the end of the war. The same dream returned each night until I dared not to go to sleep and grew quite ill. I dreamed I had a child, and even in the dream I saw it was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away. But it always crept onto my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it was my own, perhaps I could sleep. And I bent to its broken face, and it was horrible … but I kissed it. I think one must finally take one's life in one's arms.

I saw clearly only when I saw with love. Or can one ever remember love? It's like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume. And that's the truth of roses, isn't it? — The perfume?

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