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lynniekate 's review for:

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
3.0
challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Quotes:

Willy: Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there's nobody to live in it.

Biff: Well, I spent six or seven years after high school trying to work myself up. Shipping clerk, salesman, business of one kind of 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.

Biff: I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and everytime I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life.

Biff: No, I'm mixed up very bad. Maybe I oughta get married. Maybe I oughta get stuck into something. Maybe that's my trouble. I'm like a boy. I'm not married, I'm not in business, I just - I'm like a boy.

Happy: I don't know what the hell I'm workin' for. Sometimes I sit in my apartment - all alone. And I think of the rent I'm paying. And it's crazy. But then, it's what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, I'm lonely.

Willy: American is full of beautiful towns and fine, upstanding people. And they know me, boys, they know me up and down New England. The finest people. And when I bring you fellas up, there'll be open sesame for all of us, 'cause one thing, boys: I have friends.

Ben: Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.

Willy: Once in my life I would like to own something outright before it's broken! I'm always in a race with the junkyard! I just finished paying for the car and it's on its last legs. The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddam maniac. They time those things. They time them so when you finally paid for them, they're used up.

Willy: There were promises made across this desk! You mustn't tell me you've got people to see - I put thirty-four years into this firm, Howard, and now I can't pay my insurance! You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit!

Biff: 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!

Biff: He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong... He never knew who he was.