Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman (1949)

27 Sourced Quotes

View all Arthur Miller Quotes
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.

Arthur Miller
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.

Arthur Miller
Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief-optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of man.

Arthur Miller
I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.

Arthur Miller
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?

Arthur Miller
Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

Arthur Miller
When today fails to offer the justification for hope, tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing.

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

Arthur Miller
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.

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

Arthur Miller
A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.

Arthur Miller
I simply asked him if he was making any money. Is that a criticism?

Arthur Miller
Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!

Arthur Miller
I'm very well liked in Hartford. You know, the trouble is, Linda, people don't seem to take to me.

Arthur Miller
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.

Arthur Miller
Nobody dast blame this man. Willy was a salesman. And 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.

Arthur Miller
We're free and clear, Willy. We're free, we're free, we're free...

Arthur Miller
Work a lifetime to pay off a house — You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it.

Arthur Miller
They don't need me in New York. I'm the New England man. I'm vital in New England.

Arthur Miller
Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.

Arthur Miller
He wants to live on through something — and in his case, his masterpiece is his son… all of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world.

Arthur Miller
Figure it out. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there's no one to live in it.

Arthur Miller
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.

Arthur Miller
Nothing's Planted, I don't have a thing in the ground.

Arthur Miller
The world is an oyster, but you don't crack it open on a mattress.

Arthur Miller
In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks … on screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera. 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. It isn't easy to do in the theater, but it's twice as hard in film.

Arthur Miller
Isn't that — isn't that remarkable? Biff — he likes me!

Arthur Miller