Arthur Miller Quotes
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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.
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Who weeps for these, weeps for corruption!
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I like it not that Mr. Parris should lay his hand upon my baby. I see no light of God in that man. I'll not conceal it.
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Well, all the plays that I was trying to write … were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.
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You're pulling heaven down, and raising up a whore!
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Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers? I'll tell you what's walking Salem - vengeance is walking Salem. 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! This warrant's vengeance! I'll not give my wife to vengeance!
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If I see an ending, I can work backward.
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I understand his longing for immortality … Willy's writing his name in a cake of ice on a hot day, but he wishes he were writing in stone.
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The Crucible became by far my most frequently produced play, both abroad and at home. Its meaning is somewhat different in different places and moments. I can almost tell what the political situation in a country is when the play is suddenly a hit there - it is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past.
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A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance - you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.
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We cannot look to superstition in this. The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone.
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Without alienation, there can be no politics.
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Why must everybody like you?
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A person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time - we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.
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Ben, that funeral will be massive! They'll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire! All the old-timers with the strange license plates - that boy will be thunderstruck, Ben, because he never realized - I am known! Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey - I am known, Ben, and he'll see it with his eyes once and for all.
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We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealment.
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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.
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And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. 'Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?
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We're free and clear, Willy. We're free, we're free, we're free...
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A child's spirit is like a child, you cannot catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.
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An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.
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Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
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Spite, spite, is the word of your undoing!
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I'll plead no more! I see now your spirit twists around the single error of my life, and I will never tear it free!