9 Arthur Miller Quotes on Identity

Arthur Miller quotes on identity

17. Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, 'What do you do?' And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day.

19. You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.

40. I'm a fatalist. ... I consider I am rejected in principle. My work is and, through my work, I am. If it's accepted, it's miraculous or the result of a misunderstanding.

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

53. 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.

57. 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.

60. 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!

67. I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing - his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his 'rightful' position in his society. Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks t attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.

94. Danforth: Do you mean to deny this confession when you are free? Proctor: I mean to deny nothing! Danforth: Then explain to me, Mr. Proctor, why you will not let - Proctor: [With the cry of his whole soul] 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!