Top 49 Nathanael West Quotes
#1. Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.
Nathanael West
#2. Love is but a flitting shadow, a lure, a gimcrack, a kickshaw.
Nathanael West
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. But whether he was happy or not was hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither.
Nathanael West
#7. What goes on in the sea is of no interest to the rock
Nathanael West
#8. But the romantic atmosphere only heightened his feeling of icy fatness.
Nathanael West
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Feeling is of the heart and nerves and the crudeness of its expression has nothing to do with its intensity.
Nathanael West
#14. 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
#15. He read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain.
Nathanael West
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#20. Every child, everywhere; in the whole world there was not one child who was not gravely, sweetly dancing.
Nathanael West
#22. 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
#23. Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears.
Nathanael West
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. He felt like a bottle that is being slowly filled with warm, dirty warter.
Nathanael West
#28. Art Is One if Life's Richest Offerings. For those who have not the talent to create, there is appreciation.
Nathanael West
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. It was on this trip that Faye acquired a new suitor by the name of Homer Simpson.
Nathanael West
#32. Like a dead man, only friction could make him warm or violence make him mobile.
Nathanael West
#33. We must take the long view - every defeat is a victory in a war of attrition.
Nathanael West
#34. Crowds of people moved through the streets with a dream-like violence.
Nathanael West
#36. Humanity ... I'm a humanity lover. All the broken bastards ...
Nathanael West
#37. Better a live bird in the jungle of the body than two stuffed birds on the library table.
Nathanael West
#38. 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
#39. 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
#41. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while.
Nathanael West
#42. His mouth formed an O with lips torn angry in laying duck's eggs from a chicken's rectum.
Nathanael West
#43. 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
#44. Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play.
Nathanael West
#45. 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
#46. In the king's bed is always found, just before it becomes a museum piece, the droppings of the black sheep.
Nathanael West
#47. 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
#48. He's an escapist. He wants to cultivate his interior garden.
Nathanael West
#49. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top