AMArthur Miller

50 collected words

Arthur Miller

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

I look for John Proctor that took me from my sleep and put knowledge in my heart! I never knew what pretence Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons I was taught by all these Christian women and their covenanted men! And now you bid me tear the light out of my eyes! I will not, I cannot! You loved me, John Proctor, and whatever sin it is, you love me yet!

Arthur Miller / quote

02Undated

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

Arthur Miller / quote

03Undated

Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.

Arthur Miller / quote

04Undated

I know what's wrong with me - I could never stand still for death! Which you've got to do by a certain age, or be ridiculous - you've got to stand there nobly and serene, and let death run his tape on your arms and around your belly and up your crotch until he's got you fitted for that black suit. And I can't, I won't!... So I'm left with wrestling with this anachronistic energy which God has charged me with and I will use it till the dirt is shoveled in my mouth! Life! Life! Fuck death and dying!

Arthur Miller / quote

05Undated

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!

Arthur Miller / quote

06Undated

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

Arthur Miller / quote

07Undated

A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from.

Arthur Miller / quote

08Undated

Here is all the invisible world, caught, defined, and calculated. In these books the Devil stands stripped of all his brute disguises. Here are all your familiar spirits-your incubi and succubi; your witches that go by land, by air, and by sea; your wizards of the night and of the day. Have no fear now-we shall find him out and I mean to crush him utterly if he has shown his face!

Arthur Miller / quote

09Undated

Mother: What more can we be?Chris: You can be better! Once and for all you can know there's a universe of people outside and you're responsible to it, and unless you know that you threw away your son because that's how he died.

Arthur Miller / quote

10Undated

An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted.

Arthur Miller / quote

11Undated

Fear, like love, is difficult to explain after it has subsided, probably because it draws away the veils of illusion as it disappears.

Arthur Miller / quote

12Undated

The train resembles the Soviet type and is quite comfortable, but all socialist structures I have ever encountered have toilets stemming from a single model engineered by the Orthodox Church in Tsarist Russia to ensure that man never be allowed to forget the corruption of the flesh.

Arthur Miller / quote

13Undated

I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.

Arthur Miller / quote

14Undated

Pray calm yourselves. I have eleven children, and I am twenty-six times a grandma, and I have seen them all through their silly seasons, and when it come on them they will run the Devil bowlegged keeping up with their mischief. I think she'll wake when she tires of it. 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.

Arthur Miller / quote

15Undated

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds come home to roost.

Arthur Miller / quote

16Undated

The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.

Arthur Miller / quote

17Undated

A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself.

Arthur Miller / quote

18Undated

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.

Arthur Miller / quote

19Undated

The word "now" is like a bomb thrown through the window and it ticks.

Arthur Miller / quote

20Undated

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

Arthur Miller / quote

21Undated

I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self.

Arthur Miller / quote

22Undated

Can anyone 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.

Arthur Miller / quote

23Undated

The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.

Arthur Miller / quote

24Undated

The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.

Arthur Miller / quote