16 Arthur Miller Quotes on Life

Arthur Miller quotes on life

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

8. A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance - you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.

23. 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.

24. The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.

30. I figure I've done what I could do, more or less, and now I'm going back to being a chemical; all we are is a lot of talking nitrogen, you know...

34. 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.

45. 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.

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

59. You cut your life down for spite!

62. 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.

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

82. 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!

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

92. It is mistaken law that leads you to sacrifice. Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it. I beg you, woman, prevail upon your husband to confess. Let him give his lie. Quail not before God's judgment in this, for it may well be God damns a liar less than he that throws his life away for pride.

98. Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?

101. I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self. One day the house smells of fresh bread, the next of smoke and blood. One day you faint because the gardener cuts his finger off, within a week you're climbing over corpses of children bombed in a subway. What hope can there be if that is so? I tried to die near the end of the war. The same dream returned each night until I dared not to go to sleep and grew quite ill. I dreamed I had a child, and even in the dream I saw it was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away. But it always crept onto my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it was my own, perhaps I could sleep. And I bent to its broken face, and it was horrible ... but I kissed it. I think one must finally take one's life in one's arms.

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