Arthur Miller Quotes Page 2

“Sometimes... it's better for a man just to walk away.
- But if you can't walk away?
I guess that's when it's tough.”

“The jungle is dark but full of diamonds, Willy.”

“The only thing you've got in this world is what you can sell.”

“Well, I spent six or seven years after high school trying to work myself up. Shipping clerk, salesman, business of one kind or another. And it's a measly manner of existence. To get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying. To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off. And always to have to get ahead of the next fella. And still — that's how you build a future.”

“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.”

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

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

“A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.”

“A fire, a fire is burning! I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face, and yours, Danforth! For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as you quail now when you know in all your black hearts that this be fraud – God damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together!”

“An everlasting funeral marches round your heart.”

“Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”

“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.”

“He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him!”

“I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I'd find you comin' through the door.”

“I may think of you softly from time to time. But I’ll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.”

“I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it.”

“It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves.”

“It's the proper morning to fly into Hell.”

“Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you. And you know I can do it; I saw Indians smash my dear parents' heads on the pillow next to mine, and I have seen some reddish work done at night, and I can make you wish you had never seen the sun go down!”

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

“Oh, Elizabeth, your justice would freeze beer.”

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

“Sex, sin, and the Devil were early linked.”

“The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone...”

“Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.”

“We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”

“You are pulling down heaven and raising up a wh*re.”

“Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.”