Death of a Salesman Family Quotes

WILLY: She’s nothing to me, Biff. I was lonely, I was terrible lonely.
BIFF: You – you gave her Mama’s stockings! (His tears break through and he rises to go.)

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Willy’s infidelity is exposed as Biff yells at his father about the stockings he bought for his mistress. A heartbroken Biff says that the stockings should have been for his mom. Biff is angry after discovering his father with another woman in a hotel room. It is a devastating moment of disillusionment for the boy. The stockings are a symbol of betrayal. Biff carries the image of them and resentment of the father he once looked up to throughout the play.

BIFF: You fake! You phony little fake! You fake! (Overcome, he turns quickly and weeping fully goes out with his suitcase. Willy is left on the floor on his knees.)
WILLY: I gave you an order! Biff, come back here or I’ll beat you! Come back here! I’ll whip you!

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Reality brutally hits a disillusioned younger Biff as he erupts into anger at the father he looked up to for betraying his wife and family with his sexual affair. Also suggested is Willy’s violent side when he threatens to beat and whip his son. We see here a turning point in the play and a disastrous deterioration of the relationship between father and son. Biff loses all respect for Willy.

Get out of here, both of you, and don’t come back! I don’t want you tormenting him any more. Go on now, get your things together! (To Biff.) You can sleep in his apartment. (She starts to pick up the flowers and stops herself.) Pick up this stuff, I’m not your maid any more. Pick it up, you bum, you!

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Family relations reach a new low at the Loman household when Linda orders her sons out of the house. She is angry and hurt that Biff and Happy took their father to a restaurant for dinner the previous night but left him to run off with two girls. Linda the peacemaker abandons her normally calm and cheerful disposition to express outrage and even call Biff a bum.

LINDA: Shake his hand, Willy.
…BIFF: Shake hands, Dad.
WILLY: Not my hand.
BIFF: I was hoping not to go this way.
WILLY: Well, this is the way you’re going. Good-by.
(Biff looks at him a moment, then turns sharply and goes to the stairs.)
WILLY (stops him with): May you rot in hell if you leave this house!
BIFF (turning): Exactly what is it that you want from me?
WILLY: I want you to know, on the train, in the mountains, in the valleys, wherever you go, that you cut down your life for spite!

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Linda steps in as peacemaker when Biff unsuccessfully tries to get his father to shake his hand as he quits the Loman house. Willy doesn’t want his favorite son to go. He is counting on Biff to stay and make it big in business, something Willy has been unable to accomplish. Willy is a failed salesman who wants to attain vicarious success through Biff. He is convinced that his son’s decision to leave and turn his back on a career in business and sales is a betrayal of him. He feels that Biff is punishing him because of his extra marital affair. But Willy is completely wrong here.

Spite, spite, is the word of your undoing! And when you’re down and out, remember what did it. When you’re rotting somewhere beside the railroad tracks, remember, and don’t you dare blame it on me!

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Willy believes that Biff is punishing him because of the affair he had with a woman in Boston. He sees his son’s rejection as a betrayal of the ambitions he had for Biff. That of course is not true. Willy is being unrealistic by pushing Biff to achieve his own failed dreams of making his fortune in business. His son is rebelling against his father’s obsessive pursuit of material wealth and success, because he doesn’t believe it will bring him happiness.

Dad, you’re never going to see what I am, so what’s the use of arguing? If I strike oil I’ll send you a check. Meantime forget I’m alive.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. The theme of family and father and son comes into play when Biff bids goodbye to Willy and leaves the Loman home. Biff feels that he cannot have a meaningful conversation with Willy. In his parting words, he shows his love for his father. But they simply cannot live together. Willy is a selfish person who wants to live his failed American Dream of prosperity through Biff. Biff on the other hand is a lover of the ourdoors and Willy refuses to see this. He touches on Willy’s unhealthy obsession with wealth and prosperity by promising to send him a check if he strikes oil.

BIFF: You know why I had no address for three months? I stole a suit in Kansas City and I was in jail.
WILLY: I suppose that’s my fault!
BIFF: I stole myself out of every good job since high school!
WILLY: And whose fault is that?

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. In this confrontation with Willy, Biff tells his father that he was jailed for theft and in fact has been stealing since high school. This reflects Willy’s poor parenting skills and example to his sons. Willy enabled Biff’s behavior by his acceptance of Biff stealing a football from his coach in high school.

And I never got anywhere because you blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody! That’s whose fault it is!

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Biff tries to get Willy to face the truth. He says that the reason he got nowhere in life was because his father filled him with false pride and big ideas about success. He blames Willy’s poor parenting on his failures. Biff has just had an unsuccessful meeting with his former boss to get the money to start a business, but the man didn’t even remember him.

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 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!

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. In Biff’s epiphany at Bill Oliver’s office, he rejects his father’s version of the American Dream and Willy’s attempt to live vicariously through him. Biff realizes that life as a salesman and working in an office is not for him. In his final confrontation with Willy, he tells him that after his failed interview with Oliver he ran down eleven flights of stairs with Oliver’s stolen fountain pen in his hand. The pen symbolizes Willy’s American Dream of material success. Biff tells how he looked out at the expanse of the sky and the great outdoors and saw the things he loves in this world. In that moment he dismissed his father’s false values as represented by Oliver’s pen. This is Biff’s moment of catharsis and transfiguration, his moment of clarity, a declaration of independence from city living and the world of business. Biff refuses to live a lie to please his father and wants to be true to who he is.

Pop, I’m nothing! I’m nothing, Pop. Can’t you understand that? There’s no spite in it any more. I’m just what I am, that’s all.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Biff is said to be "at the peak of his fury" with his father when he says this to him. Told all his life by Willy that he was born to succeed, Biff is having a hard time getting through to a delusional Willy. Unlike his father, Biff doesn’t want to spend his life constantly working for material success, he wants to live a basic life and earn enough to get by. But Willy has unrealistic dreams of his son being rich and successful, after failing to achieve that dream for himself.

Will you let me go, for Christ’s sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Biff’s desperation is apparent as he confronts Willy about his "phony" American Dream of material success. The stage directions describe him as crying and broken when he makes this anguished plea to his father in his attempt to be honest with him. It is an important moment of self-discovery for Biff. He signals that he wants to stop deceiving himself in his efforts to fulfill his father’s false dreams. He begs to be released from them, so that he can follow his own more reality-based dreams.

(Biff’s fury has spent itself, and he breaks down, sobbing, holding on to Willy, who dumbly fumbles for Biff’s face.)…
WILLY (after a long pause, astonished, elevated): Isn’t that – isn’t that remarkable? Biff – he likes me!
LINDA: He loves you, Willy!
HAPPY (deeply moved): Always did, Pop.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. An exhausted Biff, having told his family that he is going to leave them forever, breaks down and cries and holds onto his father. In the final scene between them Willy realizes that Biff actually likes him. Touched by his son’s display of emotion, he feels a bonding and strengthening of their father-son relationship, which has been fraught for much of the play. This is reinforced by Linda and Happy assuring Willy that Biff always loved him.

WILLY: Oh, Biff! (Staring wildly.) He cried! Cried to me. (He is choking with his love, and now cries out his promise.) That boy – that boy is going to be magnificent!

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. This is Willy’s reaction when Biff breaks down in tears and holds on to his father, pleading with him to let him go and see him for who he really is. Biff wants to opt out of Willy’s grandiose and deluded dreams of success he is trying to achieve through his son. Biff wants to follow his own different path in life. But Willy completely misunderstands his son and continues to deceive himself about him. He still views Biff as the young football hero he once was, who is destined for great success and is "going to be magnificent."

There were a lot of nice days. When he’d come home from a trip, or on Sundays, making the stoop, finishing the cellar, putting on the new porch; when he built the extra bathroom; and put up the garage. You know something, Charley, there’s more of him in that front stoop than in all the sales he ever made.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Requiem. Biff is standing at his father’s graveside reminiscing about times in the Loman household. Despite a difficult relationship with Willy fraught with disagreements, Biff has fond memories of family life. Speaking to Willy’s friend Charley, he tells of his father’s heroic efforts to build a good life for the Lomans through the many improvements he made to the house. In fact Willy seemed happier working with his hands on the house than he did in his sales job.

I’m gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It’s the only dream you can have – to come out number-one man. He fought it out here, and this is where I’m gonna win it for him.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Requiem. Happy is determined to follow in his late father’s footsteps of self-deception and make-believe. He declares himself to be the inheritor of Willy’s flawed American Dream, and is fully invested in it. He vows to achieve what their father set out to do but failed: make his fortune by being the number-one salesman. Happy is reacting angrily to brother Biff’s claim that Willy never knew who he was and had the wrong dreams. He strongly defends his father’s dream and his struggle for it to succeed. Speaking at Willy’s graveside, Happy sees Willy as a kind of hero.

Why did you ever do that? Help me Willy, I can’t cry. It seems to me that you’re just on another trip. I keep expecting you. Willy, dear, I can’t cry. Why did you do it? I search and search and I search, and I can’t understand it, Willy. I made the last payment on the house today. Today, dear. And there’ll be nobody home. (A sob rises in her throat.) We’re free and clear. (Sobbing more fully, released.) We’re free. (Biff comes slowly toward her.) We’re free…We’re free.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Requiem. Linda feels abandoned by Willy after his suicide and tries to make sense of what he did. Speaking directly to him at his graveside, she begs him to help her understand. To Linda they had achieved their American Dream by owning their own house, she having made the final mortgage payment the day of his funeral. They were finally free and clear of debt, she sobbingly tells her dead husband. But it’s a hollow kind of freedom, with no Willy home to enjoy it with her. Linda feels lost and there is a bitter and tragic irony in these last words spoken in the play by her. Willy felt he was doing something good by killing himself in a car crash, because of the financial security the insurance money would provide for his family. But Willy’s final act was resented by his family, who simply wanted the father and husband they loved to be with them. By killing himself he betrayed them.
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