Top 228 Quotes & Sayings by Arthur Miller - Page 4

Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our old pretense is ripped away. Aye, and God's icy wind will blow.

Nobody dast blame this man. 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.

What work you do! It's strange work for a Christian girl to hang old women!

. . usually, the biggest problems of adapting plays into screenplays is that they stick too close to the play, and I think film is a completely different medium. I think a novel is much closer to a film.

Jerusalem is ... the fabled city which for the Western mind is as much dream as stone ... a compressed symbol of our most sublime aspirations along with our most disgusting, hatefully brainless excursions into religious bigotry and fratricide.

When a deposit bottle is broken, you don't get your nickel back.

I am a good woman. I know it.

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.

Rise early. Write. Disappoint your sons. Read the newspaper. Go to bed early. Success.

Few occasions are as joyous to small children as funerals, almost better than the big wedding blowouts that take place at night when it's hard to stay awake. A small boy will never be harshly criticized at a funeral; he is more treasured as death comes close and all his wickedness vanishes before the inescapable fact that thank God, he is healthy.

Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect.

Oh,Elizabeth, your justice would freeze beer.

The success of a play, especially one's first success, is somewhat like pushing against a door which is suddenly opened that was always securely shut until then. For myself, the experience was invigorating. It suddenly seemed that the audience was a mass of blood relations, and I sensed a warmth in the world that had not been there before. It made it possible to dream of daring more and risking more.

If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.

I still feel-kind of temporary about myself.

You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit.

A man is not a bird, to come and go with the springtime.

Witch-hunts are always spooked by women's horrifying sexuality awakened by the superstud Devil.

Glamour, that trans-human aura or power to attract imitation, is a kind of vessel into which dreams are poured, and some vessels are simply worthier than others... A beautiful woman can turn heads but real glamour has a deeper pull... Glamour is the power to rearrange people's emotions, which, in effect, is the power to control one's environment.

Try to keep the rebel artist alive in you, no matter how attractive or exhausting the temptation.

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

The world is always ending; the exact date depends on when you came into it.

Willie was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to life?. 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.

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.

That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?

There is a kind of perverse unity forming among us, born, I think, of the discontent of all classes of people with the endless frustration of life.

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.

Be liked and you will never want.

The shadow of a cornstalk on the ground is lovely, but it is no denial of its loveliness to see as one looks on it that it is telling the time of day, the position of the earth and the sun, the size of our planet and its shape, and perhaps even the length of its life and ours among the stars.

Data is a lot like humans: It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data, divorced. Gets old. One thing that it doesn't do is die. It has to be killed.

PROCTOR--he knows it is insane: No, it is not the same! What others say and what i sign to is not the same!

Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, the agony we cannot feel, the death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other.

There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism.

I'm a fatalist.... I consider I am rejected in principle. My work is and, through my work, I am. If it's accepted, it's miraculous or the result of a misunderstanding.

Peace. It is a providence, and no great change; we are only what we always were, but naked now.

The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out.

Today, [theatre's] more likely to be consciously not aimed at the public, but at a more sophisticated or educated public. . . . The result is that some of the sheer humanity has leaked out of the enterprise.

I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been.

... so many tremendous decisions in life are made because it is five o'clock.

The play is really a kind of nightmare. It ought to flow rapidly and effortlessly from one moment to another. In London, we had difficulty with the set, which required too much effort to move around. Having gotten the benefit of seeing it done once, I wanted to work on the script, to make it sharper and more pointed.

After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.

Americans don't speak foreign languages, by and large. Their interest in anything beyond the borders of the country is limited. A European of any cultivation has to speak a couple of languages; he inevitably without being very thoughtful about it gets to understand what other people think about him.

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.

PROCTOR, his mind wild, breathless: I say--I say--God is dead!

Nevertheless, one learned very early that books had to be respected; they were all putative Bibles and to some small degree had a share in holiness.

Theater is a very changeable art. It responds to the moment in history the way the newspaper does, and there's no predicting what to come up with next.

More Weight -Giles Corey-

In a dream, we are simply confronted with various loaded symbols, and where one is exhausted, it gives way to another.