Arthur Miller
The parochial snobbery of these people was partly responsible for their failure to convert the Indians. Probably they also preferred to take land from heathens rather than from fellow Christians. At any rate, very few Indians were converted, and the Salem folk believed that the virgin forest was the Devil's last preserve, his home base and the citadel of his final stand. To the best of their knowledge the American forest was the last place on earth that was not paying homage to God.Collection: Christian
I don't say he's a great man. Willie 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 in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.Collection: Dog
Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story. People elsewhere tend to accept, to a far greater degree anyway, that the conditions of life are hostile to mans pretensions.Collection: Dream
The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out.Collection: Dream
Few occasions are as joyous to small children as funerals, almost better than the big wedding blowouts that take place at night when it's hard to stay awake. A small boy will never be harshly criticized at a funeral; he is more treasured as death comes close and all his wickedness vanishes before the inescapable fact that thank God, he is healthy.Collection: Children
Nevertheless, one learned very early that books had to be respected; they were all putative Bibles and to some small degree had a share in holiness.Collection: Book
The world is always ending; the exact date depends on when you came into it.Collection: World
It may be that even if half consciously, we choose our personalities to maintain a certain saving balance in the family's little universe.Collection: Personality
Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, the agony we cannot feel, the death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other.Collection: Men
The success of a play, especially one's first success, is somewhat like pushing against a door which is suddenly opened that was always securely shut until then. For myself, the experience was invigorating. It suddenly seemed that the audience was a mass of blood relations, and I sensed a warmth in the world that had not been there before. It made it possible to dream of daring more and risking more.Collection: Dream
Try to keep the rebel artist alive in you, no matter how attractive or exhausting the temptation.Collection: Artist
After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.Collection: Years
Flight Reservation Systems decide whether or not you exist. If your information isn't in their database, then you simply don't get to go anywhere.Collection: Funny
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.Collection: Ideas
Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect.Collection: Appreciation
When a deposit bottle is broken, you don't get your nickel back.Collection: Broken
What work you do! It's strange work for a Christian girl to hang old women!Collection: Girl
PROCTOR--he knows it is insane: No, it is not the same! What others say and what i sign to is not the same!Collection: Insane
PROCTOR, his mind wild, breathless: I say--I say--God is dead!Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Principles
They tried to escape technology, to stay away from that and still have relationships with their fellow humans. Very difficult.Collection: Technology
HALE, with a tasty love of intellectual pursuitCollection: Crucible
Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you. And you know I can do it; I saw Indians smash my dear parents' heads on the pillow next to mine, and I have seen some reddish work done at night, and I can make you wish you had never seen the sun go down! - AbigailCollection: Night
Americans don't speak foreign languages, by and large. Their interest in anything beyond the borders of the country is limited. A European of any cultivation has to speak a couple of languages; he inevitably without being very thoughtful about it gets to understand what other people think about him.Collection: Country
Theater is a very changeable art. It responds to the moment in history the way the newspaper does, and there's no predicting what to come up with next.Collection: Art
In a dream, we are simply confronted with various loaded symbols, and where one is exhausted, it gives way to another.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Romance
A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can’t live that way you don’t stay.Collection: Country
Every time I am reading actors I can pretty well tell which ones have studied with Meisner. It is because they are honest and simple and don’t lay on complications that aren’t necessary.Collection: Reading
Amos Oz is one of the finest novelists of this entire period. MY MICHAEL is a beautiful work of great depth and in some indescribable way lingers in the mind as a lyric song to his country’s people as much as a moving love story.Collection: Country