Book of Quotes

The Crucible

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

-"Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven."

-"Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!"

-"Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it."

-"I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it."

-"You are pulling down heaven and raising up a whore"

- "More Weight"

- "It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves"

- "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."

-"We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!"

- "...an everlasting funeral marches round your heart."

- "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!"

- "Peace. It is a providence, and no great change; we are only what we always were, but naked now."

- "I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I'd find you comin' through the door."

- "Sex, sin, and the Devil were early linked."

- "He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him!"

- "Great stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay. They say he give them but two words. "More weight," he says. And died."

- "The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone..."

- "Oh,Elizabeth, your justice would freeze beer."

- "PROCTOR, his mind wild, breathless: I say--I say--God is dead!"

- "it's the proper morning to fly into Hell."

- "What work you do! It's strange work for a Christian girl to hang old women!"

- "When it is recalled that until the Christian era the underworld was never regardded as a hostile area, that all gods were useful and essentially friendly to man despite occasional lapsesl when we see the steady methodical inculcation into humanity of the idea of man's worthlesseness - until redeemed - the necessity of the Devil may become evident as a weapon, a weapon designed and used time and time again in every age to whip men into a surrender to a particular church or church state."

- "[W]e conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable view of cosmology. Ours is a divided empire in which certain ideas and emotions and actions are of God, and their opposites are of Lucifer. It is as impossible for most men to conceive of a morality without sin as of an earth without 'sky'. Since 1692 a great but superficial change has wiped out God's beard and the Devil's horns, but the world is still gripped between two diametrically opposed absolutes. The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon - such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas."