Nathanael West Quotes & Sayings

It was on this trip that Faye acquired a new suitor by the name of Homer Simpson. — Nathanael West

At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything. — Nathanael West

The sun is a joke. — Nathanael West

Every child, everywhere; in the whole world there was not one child who was not gravely, sweetly dancing. — Nathanael West

Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily. — Nathanael West

You once said to me that I talk like a man in a book. I not only talk, but think and feel like one. I have spent my life in books; literature has deeply dyed my brain its own colour. This literary colouring is a protective one
like the brown of the rabbit or the checks of the quail
making it impossible for me to tell where literature ends and I begin. — Nathanael West

He thought of how calm he was. His calm was so perfect that he could not destroy it even by being conscious of it. — Nathanael West

He was giving birth to groups of words. — Nathanael West

I'm going to be a star some day," she announced as though daring him to contradict her.
"I'm sure you ... "
"It's my life. It's the only thing in the whole world that I want."
"It's good to know what you want. I used to be a bookkeeper in a hotel,
but ... "
"If I'm not, I'll commit suicide. — Nathanael West

Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on eath. Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will percieve the divine mystery in things. Once you percieve it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love. — Nathanael West

He knew now what this thing was - hysteria, a snake whose scales are tiny mirrors in which the dead world takes on a semblance of life. And how dead the world is ... a world of doorknobs. He wondered if hysteria were really too steep a price to pay for bringing it to life. — Nathanael West

Humanity ... I'm a humanity lover. All the broken bastards ... — Nathanael West

Perhaps I can make you understand. Let's start from the beginning. A man is hired to give advice to the readers of a newspaper. The job is a circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke. He welcomes the job, for it might lead to a gossip column, and anyway he's tired of being a leg man. He too considers the job a joke, but after several months at it, the joke begins to escape him. He sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice, and they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator. — Nathanael West

It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous. — Nathanael West

She wasn't hard-boiled. It was just that she put love on a special plane, where a man without money or looks couldn't move. — Nathanael West

Art Is One if Life's Richest Offerings. For those who have not the talent to create, there is appreciation. — Nathanael West

Numbers constitute the only universal language. — Nathanael West

Love is but a flitting shadow, a lure, a gimcrack, a kickshaw. — Nathanael West

Better a live bird in the jungle of the body than two stuffed birds on the library table. — Nathanael West

The way to be gay is to make other people gay," Miss Lonelyhearts said. "Sleep with me and I'll be one gay dog. — Nathanael West

He's an escapist. He wants to cultivate his interior garden. — Nathanael West

His mouth formed an O with lips torn angry in laying duck's eggs from a chicken's rectum. — Nathanael West

But whether he was happy or not was hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither. — Nathanael West

Like a dead man, only friction could make him warm or violence make him mobile. — Nathanael West

What a perfect escape the return to the womb was. Better by far than Religion or Art or the South Sea Islands. It was so snug and warm there, and the feeding was automatic. — Nathanael West

His heart was a rose and in his skull another rose bloomed.
The room was full of grace. A sweet, clean grace, not washed clean, but clean as the innersides of the inner petals of a newly forced rosebud. — Nathanael West

We must take the long view - every defeat is a victory in a war of attrition. — Nathanael West

A button machine makes buttons, no matter what the power used, foot, steam or electricity. They, no matter what the motivating force, death, love or God, made jokes. — Nathanael West

They haven't the mental equipment for leisure. — Nathanael West

In the king's bed is always found, just before it becomes a museum piece, the droppings of the black sheep. — Nathanael West

Let him ride a horse. He's a cowboy ain't he? — Nathanael West

Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while. — Nathanael West

Betty took him for a walk in the zoo and he was amused by her evident belief in the curative power of animals. She seemed to think that it must steady him to look at a buffalo. — Nathanael West

The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. — Nathanael West

All these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust — Nathanael West

It seems to me that someone must surely take the hint and write the life of Miss McGeeney, the woman who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of Boswell. — Nathanael West

He Sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in the other. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature ... the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth wile. — Nathanael West

Faye burst into the room. She ignored Homer and went straight to the couch.
Now what in hell's the matter?" she exploded.
Darling daughter," he said. "I have been badly taken, and this gentleman has been kind enough to let me rest for a moment."
He had a fit or something," Homer said.
She whirled around on him so suddenly that he was startled.
How do you do?" she said, holding her hand forward and high up.
He shook it gingerly.
Charmed," she said, when he mumbled something.
She spun around once more.
It's my heart," Harry said. "I can't stand it. — Nathanael West

Man spends a great deal of time making order out of chaos, yet insists that the emotions be disordered. I order my emotions: I am insane. — Nathanael West

Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play. — Nathanael West

It's solitary drinking that makes drunkards. — Nathanael West

Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing. Tod — Nathanael West

If you're not very busy, a grown man in the uniform of a Western Union boy should make you feel a little sick. — Nathanael West

Americans have dissipated their racial energy in an orgy of stone-breaking. In their few years they have broken more stones than did centuries of Egyptians, and they have done their work hysterically, desperately, almost as if they knew that the stones would some day break them. — Nathanael West

Let us consider the holes in our own bodies and into what these congenital wounds open. Under the skin of man is a wondrous jungle where veins like lush tropical growths hang along over-ripe organs and weed-like entrails writhe in squirming tangles of red and yellow. In this jungle, flitting from rock-gray lungs to golden intestines, from liver to lights and back to liver again, lives a bird called the soul. — Nathanael West

Feeling is of the heart and nerves and the crudeness of its expression has nothing to do with its intensity. — Nathanael West

He felt as though his heart were a bomb, a complicated bomb that would result in a simple explosion, wrecking the world without rocking it. — Nathanael West

Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears. — Nathanael West

He smoked a cigarette, standing in the dark and listening to her undress. She made sea sounds; something flapped like a sail; there was the creak of ropes; then he heard the wave-against-a-wharf smack of rubber on flesh. Her call for him to hurry was a sea-moan, and when he lay beside her, she heaved, tidal, moon-driven. — Nathanael West

But the romantic atmosphere only heightened his feeling of icy fatness. — Nathanael West

He read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain. — Nathanael West

Crowds of people moved through the streets with a dream-like violence. — Nathanael West

It was very sad under the trees. Although spring was well advanced, in the deep shade there was nothing but death-rotten leaves, gray and white fungi, and over everything a funeral hush. — Nathanael West

No dream ever entirely disappears. Somewhere it troubles some unfortunate person and some day, when that person has been sufficiently troubled, it will be reproduced on the lot. — Nathanael West

He felt like a bottle that is being slowly filled with warm, dirty warter. — Nathanael West

He did not feel guilty. He did not feel. The rock was a solidification of his feeling, his conscience, his sense of reality, his self-knowledge. — Nathanael West

As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt.
What the little park needed, even more than he did, was a drink. Neither alcohol nor rain would do. Tomorrow, in his column, he would ask Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Desperate, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband and the rest of his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up, flowers that smelled of feet.
"Ah, humanity ... " But he was heavy with shadow and the joke went into a dying fall. He trist to break its fall by laughing at himself. — Nathanael West

You dedicate your life to the pursuit of pleasure. No over-indulgence, mind you, but knowing that your body is apleasure machine, you treat it carefully in order to get the most out of it. — Nathanael West

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing. — Nathanael West

What goes on in the sea is of no interest to the rock — Nathanael West