PROCTOR – he knows it is insane: No, it is not the same! What others say and what i sign to is not the same!
You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away – a man is not a piece of fruit.
But we are mostly what we are, and the turtle stretching toward delicious buds on high does not lighten his carapace by his resolve.
You specialize in something until one day it is specializing in you.
He’s liked, but he’s not well liked.
I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been.
Controlled hysteria is what’s required. To exist constantly in a state of controlled hysteria. It’s agony. But everyone has agony. The difference is that I try to take my agony home and teach it to sing.
Charley: He won’t starve. None a them starve. Forget about him. Willy: Then what have I got to remember?
The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone...
PROCTOR, his mind wild, breathless: I say – I say – God is dead!
People do look to others for some leadership, and it’s not bad for them to supply it when they feel that way.
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.
The two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they’re both about father-son relationships.
Playwriting is an oral art; it’s not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard.
A friend of mine once said that there were only two truly national events in the history of the United States. One was the Civil War and the other one was the Depression.
In a dream, we are simply confronted with various loaded symbols, and where one is exhausted, it gives way to another.
I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw – the sky. I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time time to sit and smoke. And I looked at the pen and said to myself, what the hell am I grabbing this for? 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! Why can’t I say that, Willy?
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.
I may think of you softly from time to time. But I’ll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.
Well, I spent six or seven years after high school trying to work myself up. Shipping clerk, salesman, business of one kind or another. And it’s a measly manner of existence. To get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying. To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off. And always to have to get ahead of the next fella. And still – that’s how you build a future.