The Crucible – a play by Arthur Miller
JR’s Top Crucible Quotes
According to the rubric, a key knowledge and skill of text response writing is the
ability to draw on textual evidence to support analysis.
This list is not definitive but is a selection of shorter easier to remember quotes
from a variety of characters.
Act 1
1. Proctor: “What’s this mischief here?” Pg28
2. Proctor: “Ah, you’re wicked yet, aren’t y! You’ll be clapped in the stocks
before you’re twenty.” Pg28
3. Abigail: "I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you." Pg26
4. Abigail: “I’m a good girl! I’m a proper girl!” Pg45
5. Mary Warren: "Witchery's a hangin' error, a hangin' like they done in
Boston two year ago!" Pg26
6. Mary Warren: “It’s a sin to conjure.” Pg27
7. Betty: “You drank a charm to kill John Proctor’s wife! You drank a charm
to kill Goody Proctor!” Pg26
Act 2
8. Elizabeth: “…And folks are brought before them, and if they scream and
howl and fall to the floor – the person’s clapped in the jail for bewitchin’
them”. Pg53
9. Elizabeth: “Then go and tell her she’s a whore. Whatever promise she may
sense – break it, John, break it”. Pg60
10. Proctor: “I mean to please you, Elizabeth”. Pg52
11. Proctor: “It’s hard to think so pious a woman be secretly a Devil’s bitch
after seventy year of such good prayer”. Pg62
12. Proctor: “I’ll tell you what’s walking Salem – vengeance is walking Salem”.
Pg72
13. Proctor: “…now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the
kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law”. Pg72
14. Mary Warren [with a stamp of her foot]: I’ll not be ordered to bed no
more, Mr Proctor! I am eighteen and a woman…” Pg59
15. Giles: “And yet silent, minister? It is a fraud, you know it is fraud! What
keeps you, man?” Pg73
16. Giles: “John – tell me, are we lost?” Pg74
Act 3
17. Proctor: “Now remember what the angel Raphael said to the boy Tobias.
Remember it…’Do that which is good, and no harm shall come to thee’”.
Pg86
18. Proctor: “You are pulling Heaven down and raising up a whore”. Pg105
19. Hale: “I have this morning signed away the soul of Rebecca Nurse, Your
Honor. I’ll not conceal it, my hand shakes yet as with a wound!” Pg89-90
20. Hale: “This girl has always struck me [as] false”. Pg100
Act 4
21. Danforth: “Mr Parris, you are a brainless man!” Pg111
22. Danforth: “Hang them high over the town! Who weeps for these, weeps
for corruption”. Pg125
23. Hale: “Excellency, there are orphans wandering from house to house;
abandoned cattle bellow on the highroads, the stink of rotting crops
hangs everywhere…” Pg114
24. Parris: “…Andover has thrown out the court, they say, and will have no
part in witchcraft”. Pg111
25. Elizabeth: “Whatever you will do, it is a good man does it”. Pg119
26. Elizabeth: “I have sins of my own to count. It needs a cold wife to prompt
lechery…I never knew how I should say my love. It were a cold house I
kept!” Pg119
27. Elizabeth: “He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him”.
Pg126
28. Proctor: “You are a – marvel, Elizabeth”. Pg117
29. Proctor: “Is there no good penitence but it be public? God does not need
my name nailed upon the church! God sees my name; God knows how
black my sins are!” Pgs123-124
30. Proctor: “I have three children – how may I teach them to walk like men
in the world, and I sold my friends”. Pg124