“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
“Numbers constitute the only universal language.”
— Nathanael West
“We must take the long view—every defeat is a victory in a war of attrition.”
— Nathanael West
“Art Is One if Life’s Richest Offerings. For those who have not the talent to create, there is appreciation.”
— 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
“All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges? Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a “holocaust of flame,” as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash. 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, wars. Their 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
“…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’s solitary drinking that makes drunkards.”
— 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
“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
“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
“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
“Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.”
— Nathanael West
“He read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain.”
— 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
“Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears.”
— Nathanael West