Quotes from Nathanael West

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 it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth wile.

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.

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.

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.

Humanity...I'm a humanity lover. All the broken bastards...

He thought of how calm he was. His calm was so perfect that he could not destroy it even by being conscious of it.

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

They haven't the mental equipment for leisure.

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

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

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.

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.

[On the Hollywood studio system:] A sargasso of the imagination!

The Miss Lonelyhearts are the priests of twentieth-century America.

Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you.

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.

He was giving birth to groups of words.

It's solitary drinking that makes drunkards.

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

It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.

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.

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.

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

Once he had tried to get fired by recommending suicide in his column. All that Shrike had said was : "Remember, please, that you job is to increase the circulation of our paper. Suicide, it is only reasonable to think, must defeat this purpose".