Linda Loman Quotes

Most often jovial, she has developed an iron repression of her exceptions to Willy’s behavior – she more than loves him, she admires him, as though his mercurial nature, his temper, his massive dreams and little cruelties, served her only as sharp reminders of the turbulent longings within him, longings which she shares but lacks the temperament to utter and follow to their end.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. The stage directions introduce Linda as a cheerful supportive wife who only sees the good side of husband Willy Loman’s moody personality. Deeply loving and loyal, she goes along with Willy’s fantasies and puts up with his cruel behavior so as not to hurt him. Despite Willy’s faults, she represses her own thoughts and personality to provide unconditional love and admiration for him. By refusing to criticize him and his unrealistic dreams, she may be seen to be the enabler of Willy’s self-deception and salesman’s fantasies.

WILLY: I got as far as a little above Yonkers. I stopped for a cup of coffee. Maybe it was the coffee…I suddenly couldn’t drive any more. The car kept going off onto the shoulder, y’know?
LINDA: Oh. Maybe it was the steering again…Maybe it’s your glasses.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. A physically and emotionally drained Willy arrives home early to his wife Linda after struggling to drive and being a danger behind the wheel of his car. He deludes himself into blaming the coffee. Linda feeds her husband’s self-deception by putting it down to the car’s steering or his spectacles. From the very opening of the play, it appears that everything is not OK with Willy. This exchange is foreshadowing of his death in a faked car accident so that his family can collect Willy’s life insurance. We also witness Linda making excuses for her husband’s mistakes and acting as if nothing is wrong with him. Thus Linda acts as an enabler of the dysfunction in the Loman family, by ignoring and brushing aside her husband’s mistakes and mental problems.

WILLY: I have such thoughts, I have such strange thoughts.
LINDA: Willy, dear. Talk to them again. There’s no reason why you can’t work in New York.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. Willy arrives home to wife Linda after his aborted sales trip to New England, mentally troubled. He has confessed to lapsing into a trance-like state while driving and almost going off the road in his car. At the beginning of the play, we learn that Willy is considering suicide, admitting to having "strange" thoughts. But Linda does not confront Willy about this, despite the fact that he is in clear need of phychological help and care. She insists that he is just tired and asks him to request a job transfer to New York, so he doesn’t need to travel anymore. Linda’s failure to admit to her husband’s mental problems means that she is a classic enabler who prevents Willy from getting the help he clearly needs. Willy’s words foreshadow his suicide.

LINDA: Well, dear, life is a casting off. It’s always that way.
WILLY: No, no, some people – some people accomplish something.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. Linda is speaking to Willy about their two adults sons who have returned to live with them. She uses a knitting metaphor to compare life to finishing a completed, knitted item with a tying off stitch to prevent it from unraveling. As the voice of reason, she tries to get her husband to understand that not everything in life can be controlled. But Willy subscribes completely to the American Dream of prosperity and success and cannot fathom why he has achieved so little in this regard.

WILLY: How can he find himself on a farm? Is that a life? A farmhand? In the beginning, when he was young, I thought, well, a young man, it’s good for him to tramp around, take a lot of different jobs. But it’s more than ten years now and he has yet to make thirty-five dollars a week!
LINDA: He’s finding himself, Willy.
WILLY: Not finding yourself at the age of thirty-four is a disgrace!

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. Willy is bitterly disappointed at son Biff when he returns home from the West after working as a farmhand for a few dollars a week. He views Biff’s failure to achieve financial success as a kind of betrayal of his own expections for his 34-year-old elder and favorite son. He feels Biff is wasting away his life working on a Texas farm. The irony is that Willy himself often yearns for the simpler life away from the city and close to nature, the one his son has been living. Linda defends Biff saying he is still trying to find himself.

WILLY: Why do you get American when I like Swiss?
LINDA: I just thought you’d like a change – .
WILLY: I don’t want a change! I want Swiss cheese. Why am I always being contradicted?
LINDA (with a covering laugh): I thought it would be a surprise.
WILLY: Why don’t you open a window in here, for God’s sake?
LINDA (with infinite patience): They’re all open, dear.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. This exchange shows how Willy likes routine and hates change. It also demonstrates how Linda goes out of her way to make her husband happy, but he on the other hand doesn’t treat her well. When she changes his cheese and offers him American whipped instead of Swiss, she is shouted at by an uncompromising Willy.

LINDA: Just mending my stockings. They’re so expensive.
WILLY (angrily, taking them from her): I won’t have you mending stockings in this house! Now throw them out! (Linda puts the stockings in her pocket.)

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. Willy returns to reality after hallucinating about the The Woman he has been having an affair with. He has gifted The Woman a pair of brand new and expensive stockings, when he cannot even provide for his own wife Linda and family. He lashes out angrily at Linda when he sees her mending her torn stockings. This is Willy being haunted by his own guilty conscience, because the stocking are a reminder of his betrayal of his wife.

LINDA: He’s too rough with the girls, Willy. All the mothers are afraid of him!
WILLY: I’ll whip him!
BERNARD: He’s driving the car without a license!
(The Woman’s laugh is heard.)
WILLY: Shut up!

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. We catch a glimpse of the bad side to Biff’s character from Linda. After reminding Willy that Biff stole the coach’s football, she reveals that the other mothers fear him because he is "too rough" with their daughters. Bernard adds his two cents worth by saying that Biff is driving without a license. As the laughter of The Woman is heard (in a confused Willy’s mind only), Willy responds to hearing the unpleasant truth about his favorite son by screaming at them all to shut up!

WILLY: Whatever happened to that diamond watch fob? Remember? When Ben came from Africa that time? Didn’t he give me a watch fob with a diamond in it?
LINDA: You pawned it, dear. Twelve, thirteen years ago. For Biff’s radio correspondence course.
WILLY: Gee, that was a beautiful thing. I’ll take a walk.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. After having a flashback about his brother Ben, Willy asks Linda what happened to the diamond studded watch fob Ben gave him. We learn that he pawned the family heirloom to pay for one of Biff’s courses that led him nowhere – his son failed to graduate from high school after failing math.

When you write you’re coming, he’s all smiles, and talks about the future, and – he’s just wonderful. And then the closer you seem to come, the more shaky he gets, and, then, by the time you get here, he’s arguing, and he seems angry at you. I think it’s just that maybe he can’t bring himself to – to open up to you. Why are you so hateful to each other? Why is that?

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. Linda is speaking to Biff about how upset Willy gets whenever his son comes home. Willy is bitterly disappointed that Biff hasn’t made more of his life than working at a farmhand in Texas. But there is another reason behind the animosity between father and son, a secret Linda doesn’t know about. During Biff’s senior year in high school he discovered that his father betrayed his mother with a woman in a Boston hotel. He lost faith in his father and dropped his studies. After that their encounters tend to be confrontational and bristling with hostility.

I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy 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.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. In one of the play’s most famous speeches, Linda makes this impassioned appeal for the ordinary human being to be respected and afforded their dignity. Accepting her husband’s weaknesses, she strongly defends him to her two sons after Biff calls him crazy and says he has no character. Her soliloquy admonishes and pleads with them not to abandon him. It is her cry of insistance on the dignity of the weak, those cast aside by the system, and not just the strong. The life and death of the little man is of as much importance as that of the great man, she believes. The message of her speech is that every human being matters and no one is disposable. This includes an insignificant person like Willy, betrayed and abandoned by a capitalist system that has no further use for him. Miller uses pathos throughout the play but here it is heightened as Linda, who is devoted to Willy, asks for respect to be shown to her flawed husband. During this key moment we hear in Linda’s voice the rage of Miller as he questions the morality of a society that uses people as tools for profit and then discards them. Employing a graphic simile, Linda pleads with Biff to reconcile with his father and not abandon him so that he dies "like an old dog." Linda appears to accept the inevitability of Willy’s imminent death, which is foreshadowed here. The passage shows her deep devotion to Willy.

A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man. He works for a company thirty-six years this March, opens up unheard-of territories to their trademark, and now in his old age they take his salary away.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. Linda demands from her sons that they pay attention and respect to Willy after he is fired from his job. Devoted to her husband, she explains how an ordinary man like Willy can be as exhausted by life as a great man. She is angry that having devoted a great part of his life to the company he worked for, he has been discarded by his employer. She is making the point that any individual, regardless of status, can be ground down by the burdens of life.

BIFF: Those ungrateful bastards!
LINDA: Are they any worse than his sons? When he brought them business, when he was young, they were glad to see him. But now his old friends, the old buyers that loved him so and always found some order to hand him in a pinch – they’re all dead, retired. He used to be able to make six, seven calls a day in Boston. Now he takes his valises out of the car and puts them back and takes them out again and he’s exhausted. Instead of walking he talks now. He drives seven hundred miles, and when he gets there no one knows him any more, no one welcomes him. And what goes through a man’s mind, driving seven hundred miles home without having earned a cent? Why shouldn’t he talk to himself? Why? When he has to go to Charley and borrow fifty dollars a week and pretend to me that it’s his pay? How long can that go on? How long? You see what I’m sitting here and waiting for? And you tell me he has no character? The man who never worked a day but for your benefit? When does he get the medal for that? Is this his reward – to turn around at the age of sixty-three and find his sons, who he loved better than his life, one a philandering bum…

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. Linda delivers a long, powerful monologue to her sons in defense of Willy. It comes in response to Biff blasting his father’s employers as "ungrateful bastards" for placing him on straight commission "like a beginner, an unknown," as Linda puts it. She is aware of her husband’s failures and self-deceptions, the downward spiral in his career and mental health, his borrowing money from Charley to make ends meet. But nevertheless she is devoted to Willy and her family. Linda may display a meek nature throughout the play, but this emotional speech highlights her strength of character. She defends her husband as a hard worker and good father who sacrificed to provide for his two sons. She upbraids Biff and Happy for their neglectful behavior towards their father and not recognizing his true worth.

I’m – I’m ashamed to. How can I mention it to him? Every day I go down and take away that little rubber pipe. But, when he comes home, I put it back where it was. How can I insult him that way? I don’t know what to do. I live from day to day, boys. I tell you, I know every thought in his mind. It sounds so old-fashioned and silly, but I tell you he put his whole life into you and you’ve turned your backs on him. (She is bent over in the chair, weeping, her face in her hands.) Biff, I swear to God! Biff, his life is in your hands!

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. Linda Loman is the classic enabler, whose passive ways contributes to the dysfunction of the Loman men. She supports their bad decisions and fails to call them out when they are wrong. Her enabling is very obvious when she learns of her husband’s suicide attempts. He has been attaching a rubber pipe to the gas line and inhaling the deadly carbon monoxide. Instead of urging her husband to stop, Linda says nothing out of fear of insulting him, but simply removes the pipe each day. She admonishes her sons Biff and Happy for turning their backs on their father, insinuating that their abandonment is linked to his suicidal thoughts. This passage foreshadows Willy’s suicide.

LINDA: Isn’t that wonderful?
WILLY: Don’t interrupt. What’s wonderful about it? There’s fifty men in the City of New York who’d stake him.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. Willy shows great disrespect to his wife when the family are discussing Biff and Happy going into business together. When Linda tries to say something, he doesn’t allow her have a voice and shoots her down. Moments later when Linda against tries to enter the conversation, Willy tells his wife to "Stop interrupting."

LINDA (entering her bedroom and addressing Willy, who is in the bathroom. She is straightening the bed for him): Can you do anything about the shower? It drips.
WILLY (from the bathroom): All of a sudden everything falls to pieces. Goddam plumbing, oughta be sued, those people. I hardly finished putting it in and the thing…(His words rumble off.)

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. The American Dream of Willy Loman is falling apart, as evidenced by Linda’s complaint that their shower is no longer working. The shower has seen better days and no longer function properly, just like like Willy himself.

LINDA: I’m just wondering if Oliver will remember him. You think he might?
WILLY (coming out of the bathroom in his pajamas): Remember him? What’s the matter with you, you crazy? If he’d’ve stayed with Oliver he’d be on top by now! Wait’ll Oliver gets a look at him. You don’t know the average caliber any more. The average young man today – (he is getting into bed) – is got a caliber of zero. Greatest thing in the world for him was to bum around.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. A delusional Willy is in denial about Biff. He deceives himself into believing that his son was more than just a humble shipping clerk when he worked for Oliver. To Willy Biff is superior to the regular young man and will impress his former employer Oliver enough for him to invest in Biff’s business idea. Linda indulges Willy’s delusions.

WILLY (unable to resist): And if anything falls off the desk while you’re talking to him – like a package or something – don’t you pick it up. They have office boys for that.
LINDA: I’ll make a big breakfast…
WILLY: Will you let me finish? (To Biff.) Tell him you were in the business in the West. Not farm work.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. Willy teaches his sons that they are superior to everybody else, something he believes will make them successful but in fact makes them unsuccessful. He urges Biff in his meeting with Oliver not to behave like his servant by picking up anything that falls off his desk. Showing his failure as a father, he suggests that Biff lie about being a farm worker and instead say that he has been in business in the West. He also disrespects his wife Linda by rudely interrupting her when she tries to speak,

WILLY: Gee, on the way home tonight I’d like to buy some seeds.
LINDA (laughing): That’d be wonderful. But not enough sun gets back there. Nothing’ll grow any more.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Willy discusses with Linda the idea of planting some seeds in the backyard. His wife laughingly suggests that her husband’s plans are unlikely to succeed because the yard is so dark as it is surrounded by city apartment blocks. The image of seeds relates to Willy’s American Dream of material prosperity and also his love of nature vs city life.

LINDA: All told, about two hundred dollars would carry us, dear. But that includes the last payment on the mortgage. After this payment, Willy, the house belongs to us.
WILLY: It’s twenty-five years!
LINDA: Biff was nine years old when we bought it.
WILLY: Well, that’s a great thing. To weather a twenty-five year mortgage is…
LINDA: It’s an accomplishment.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. The Lomans’ desire to own their own house represents the American Dream for them, but it can also become a burden. An upbeat Linda chats to her husband about their finances and how they have only one more payment left on their house mortgage. She puts on a cheerful tone as she helps Willy dress for his upcoming interview with his boss Howard. Sadly Willy won’t live to see the mortgage paid off. His meeting with Howard doesn’t go well, and he feels that he has to commit suicide so that the life insurance money will give his family financial security and enable them pay their bills, including the last mortgage payment.

You know that little rubber pipe I told you about? That he connected to the gas heater? I finally decided to go down the cellar this morning and take it away and destroy it. But it’s gone! Imagine? He took it away himself, it isn’t there!

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Willy’s suicide is foreshadowed by Linda’s reference to her husband connecting the rubber pipe to the gas heater. Speaking to Biff on the phone, Linda is at first happy that the pipe has been removed and thinks that Willy did this himself. But she is disappointed when she learns it is Biff who took away the pipe.

And have a nice time with Dad. He may have big news too!…That’s right, a New York job. And be sweet to him tonight, dear. Be loving to him. Because he’s only a little boat looking for a harbor. (She is trembling with sorrow and joy.)

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. In a phone conversation with Biff ahead of Willy’s job interview, Linda shows that she shares her husband’s tendency towards self-deception and false hope. She is convinced that Willy will get the job in New York and also that Biff can be sweet and loving towards his father despite the animosity between them. In a metaphor foreshadowing Willy’s suicide, Linda likens her husband to a small boat lost at sea and in search of a harbor. Linda’s great love and loyalty towards Willy are demonstrated here.

Biff, you’ll save his life.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Linda looks to her son Biff to save Willy from killing himself, thus placing an intolerable burden on him. Linda is desperate for Biff to reconcile with his father and also set himself up in a successful job or business, so that Willy will abandon his attempts to commit suicide. Ironically Biff is part of the reason Willy ends up taking his life, believing that the twenty thousand dollar life insurance payout will provide financial security for his family and a leg up in life for Biff.

WILLY: No, wait! Linda, he’s got a proposition for me in Alaska.
LINDA: But you’ve got – (To Ben) He’s got a beautiful job here.
WILLY: But in Alaska, kid, I could – .
LINDA: You’re doing well enough, Willy!
BEN (to linda): Enough for what, my dear?
LINDA (frightened of Ben and angry at him): Don’t say those things to him! Enough to be happy right here, right now.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. When Ben proposes that Willy go to Alaska to look after some timberland for him there, Linda objects. She argues that her husband is already doing well in his current job as a salesman. Linda is in denial about Willy’s failings and his struggles to keep his job, which goes to the theme of self-deception. The theme of nature vs city is also found in this passage.
    • 1
    • 2
Close