Arthur Miller Quotes
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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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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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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?
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Who weeps for these, weeps for corruption!
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If I see an ending, I can work backward.
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You're pulling heaven down, and raising up a whore!
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Without alienation, there can be no politics.
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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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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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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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We cannot look to superstition in this. The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone.
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Why must everybody like you?
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We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealment.
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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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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'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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Spite, spite, is the word of your undoing!
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Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
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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!
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If I have any justification for having lived it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that.
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A playwright lives in an occupied country… And if you can't live that way you don't stay.
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Wonderful coffee. Meal in itself
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Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.