“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 Copy Share Image
“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,… — Nathanael West Copy Share Image
“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.… — Nathanael West Copy Share Image
He felt as though his heart were a bomb, a complicated bomb that would result in a simple explosion, wrecking the world without rocking… — Nathanael West Copy Share Image
He read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain. — Nathanael West Copy Share Image
“He Sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in the other. Mandolins are tuned G… — Nathanael West Copy Share Image
“Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on eath. Love all… — Nathanael West Copy Share Image
Prayers for the condemned man will be offered on an adding machine. Numbers constitute the only universal language. — Nathanael West Copy Share Image
Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily. — Nathanael West Copy Share Image
“But now let us consider the holes in our own bodies and into what these congenital wounds open. Under the skin of man is… — Nathanael West Copy Share Image
You once said to me that I talk like a man in a book. I not only talk, but think and feel like one.… — Nathanael West Copy Share Image
“Art Is One if Life's Richest Offerings. For those who have not the talent to create, there is appreciation.” — Nathanael West Copy Share Image
“His mouth formed an O with lips torn angry in laying duck's eggs from a chicken's rectum.” — Nathanael West Copy Share Image
Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears. When they finish, they feel better. But to those without hope, whose anguish is… — Nathanael West Copy Share Image
At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute… — Nathanael West Copy Share Image
“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… — Nathanael West Copy Share Image