Артур Миллер цитаты

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„Просто помни, малыш, ты можешь вернуть украденый миллион долларов быстрее, чем слово, которое ты дал.“

„Там, где начинается выбор, кончается рай и невинность.“

„Она могла быть серьезной, только когда принадлежала себе. Стоило ей попасть в фокус чьего-то внимания, она тут же начинала смеяться — этакая счастливая беззаботная блондинка. На экране её видели веселой, а в жизни она была очень грустной женщиной. Мэрилин могла быть какой угодно, — но она никогда не была равнодушной. Сами её мучения свидетельствовали о том, что она жила и боролась. Она была живым укорам всем равнодушным.“

„Мир устроен не для святых.“

„Хорошая газета — это нация, разговаривающая сама с собой.“

„Разве в Америке была какая-нибудь другая женщина, за которой бы гоняли из Нью-Йорка туда-обратно вертолет ради двух фотографий? Что-то ненормальное было в том, как все в ней нуждались. Она обладала поистине магической властью! В ее популярности было что-то скрытно-параноидальное. Она была женщиной, но не могла вести семейную жизнь, играя на публике отведенную ей роль. То, что ей приходилось воспринимать себя в двух ипостасях — собственными глазами и глазами зрителей, — видимо, усиливало неизбежность нервного расстройства. Будучи порождением эпохи сороковых-пятидесятых годов, она доказала, что сексуальность не уживается в американской душе с серьезностью.“

„Я не лучший из людей, Вилли, и ты тоже! Всю свою жизнь ты был всего лишь бродячим продавцом чужого добра. И тебя, как и многих других, в конце концов выкинули на помойку!“

„Человек не может уйти так же, как он пришёл, человек должен что-то после себя оставить.“

„Общество и человек есть враги, зависящие друг от друга, и труд писателя сводится к вечному определению и защите этого парадокса — не позволяя, упаси Боже, ему разрешиться.“

„Она была на сто процентов женщина, самая женственная из всех женщин в мире…“

“An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.”

“Isn't that — isn't that remarkable? Biff — he likes me!”

“Theology, sir, is a fortress; no crack in a fortress may be accounted small.”

“Personality always wins the day.”

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

“There are wheels within wheels in this village, and fires within fires!”

“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.”

“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…”

“If I see an ending, I can work backward.”

“The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.”

“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!”

“Hale: There is a prodigious fear of this court in the country —
Danforth: Then there is a prodigious guilt in the country. Are you afraid to be questioned here?
Hale: I may only fear the Lord, sir, but there is fear in the country nevertheless.
Danforth: Reproach me not with the fear in the country; there is fear in the country because there is a moving plot to topple Christ in the country!
Hale: But it does not follow that everyone accused is part of it.
Danforth: No uncorrupted man may fear this court, Mr. Hale!”

“You cut your life down for spite!”

“I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.”

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

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

“Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect.
No tragedy can therefore come about when its author fears to question absolutely everything, when he regards any institution, habit or custom as being either everlasting, immutable or inevitable. In the tragic view the need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star, and whatever it is that hedges his nature and lowers it is ripe for attack and examination.”

“The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down…. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality.”

“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.”

“Wonderful coffee. Meal in itself”

“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.”

“We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealment.”

“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.”

“Without alienation, there can be no politics.”

“Who weeps for these, weeps for corruption!”

“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!”

“I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match.”

“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.”

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