Quotes from Arthur Miller

cleave not to faith when faith brings blood. - Rev. John Hale

Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it.

Do I raise the dead when I put him behind bars? Then what'll I do it for? We used to shoot a man who acted like a dog, but honor was real there, you were protecting something. But here? This is the land of the great big dogs, you don't love a man here, you eat him!

But you didn't rest your mind. your mind is overactive, and the mind is what counts, dear

John Proctor's flaw is his failure, until the last moment, to distinguish guilt from responsibility; America's is to believe that it is at the same time both guilty and without flaw.

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

You never do any good until you get into some trouble.

Everything influences playwrights. A playwright who isn't influenced is never of any use.

The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is, you're a salesman, and you don't know that.

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.

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

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.

It was in my twenties that I felt old, that was when time was an abrasive wheel grinding me down. But it was not so much death I feared as insignificance.

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

Now remember what the angel Raphael said to the boy Tobias. Remember it. 'Do that which is good,and no harm shall come to thee.

How can they whip cheese?

Willy: Remember those two beautiful elm trees out there? When I and Biff hung the swings between them? Linda: Yeah, like being a million miles from the city.

Elizabeth, with sarcasm and a sense of being lost: Oh indeed! Indeed!

Well, dear, life is a casting off. It's always that way.

You want somethin' else, Eddie, and you can never have her!

It is as though they stood in a spinning world.

The job is to ask questions — it always was — and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.

it is an allegory of our times.