“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 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. 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… — Nathanael West Copy Share
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 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… — Nathanael West Copy Share
“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… — Nathanael West Copy Share
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 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… — Nathanael West Copy Share
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… — Nathanael West Copy Share
“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
