Willy Loman Quotes

Willy Loman: I don't want change, I want Swiss cheese!

I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!

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.

HAPPY: All right, boy. 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.

I'll tell u boys it's tough to be alone, and it's tough to love a doll that's not ur own.

I am still feeling kinda temporary about myself

Be liked and you will never want.

Social media is based on a simple economy: Outgoing attention is the labor that social media requires of its proletariat; incoming attention is the wage it pays them. The group dynamics in this economy of little Willy Lomans all but ensure that the majority of the ordinary person’s social-media interactions are with like-minded people and that these groups of like-minded people self-radicalize in the way most like-minded groups do, a pattern that has long been familiar to scholars of deliberation and group psychology.

After thirty years of working with the most violent men our society produces, I am convinced that we do not need to give up on anyone. Even the most intractably violent people can learn to live with others in ways that are constructive rather than destructive. So there are many reasons why even those who feel nothing but detestation for every violent criminal in the world might still conclude, on the basis of self-interest, that these men deserve all the attention we can give them. That leads to another meaning of the concept of respect. The German word for attention — Achtung — also means respect. And that makes sense: the way you truly respect someone is to pay attention to them, and if you are not giving them your full attention, you are disrespecting them. That is one reason, I think, that psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are such deep forms of respect for human beings and human dignity. They involve, indeed they consist of, paying full attention to another human being. It is not only Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman to whom attention must be paid; we all need attention. When we get it, we know that we are being respected. That also helps to explains the etiology of violence: assaulting people is a foolproof way to get their attention. Since everyone needs respect/attention, if they cannot get it non-violently, they will get it violently. And I have never met a group of people who had been so profoundly neglected and deprived, and who had received so little of either attention or respect, as the prison inmates.

Flannery still wouldn’t look at me. I didn’t like that. Flannery was the kind of guy who lived for the Willy Loman world of shined shoes and eye contact. I knew the type. I didn’t want anything to do with them, but I knew them.

We do this because a century and a half ago we embraced business as the dominant model for our outer and inner lives. Ours is an ideology of achieved identity; obligatory striving is its method, and failure and success are its outcomes. We reckon our incomes once a year but audit ourselves daily, by standards of long-forgotten origin. Who thinks of the old counting house when we "take stock" of how we "spend" our lives, take "credit" for our gains, or try not to end up "third rate" or "good for nothing"? Someday, we hope, "the bottom line" will show that we "amount to something." By this kind of talk we "balance" our whole lives, not just our accounts. Willy Loman speaks this way. Choosing suicide to launch his sons with insurance money, he asks, "Does it take more guts to stand here the rest of my life ringing up a zero?" He insists that a man is not a piece of fruit to be eaten and the peel discarded, but he does not see that a man is not a cash register.'°

WILLY: Biff is a lazy bum! LINDA: They’re sleeping. Get something to eat. Go on down. WILLY: Why did he come home? I would like to know what brought him home. LINDA: I don’t know. I think he’s still lost, Willy. I think he’s very lost. WILLY: Biff Loman is lost. In the greatest country in the world a young man with such—personal attractiveness, gets lost. And such a hard worker. There’s one thing about Biff—he’s not lazy.

In a period when Tom was anxious about whether he could keep his job at the hospital or would have to go on relief, he exclaimed, “If I could not support my family, I’d as soon jump off the dock.” That is, if the value of being a self-respecting wage-earner were threatened, Tom, like the salesman Willie Loman and countless other men in our society, would feel he no longer existed as a self, and might as well be dead.

Tom was anxious about whether he could keep his job at the hospital or would have to go on relief, he exclaimed, “If I could not support my family, I’d as soon jump off the dock.” That is, if the value of being a self-respecting wage-earner were threatened, Tom, like the salesman Willie Loman and countless other men in our society, would feel he no longer existed as a self, and might as well be dead.