Nathanael West Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

He was giving birth to groups of words.

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

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

The sun is a joke.

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

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.

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

It's solitary drinking that makes drunkards.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

But whether he was happy or not it is hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither. He had memories to disturb him and a plant hasn't, but after the first bad night his memories were quiet.

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

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.

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

They haven't the mental equipment for leisure.

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

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

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

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

Love is but a flitting shadow, a lure, a gimcrack, a kickshaw.

As he stood smiling, a little wave crept up out of the general welter and splashed at his feet for attention. It was Betty.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears.

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.