Every child, everywhere; in the whole world there was not one child who was not gravely, sweetly dancing.
Nathanael WestFeeling is of the heart and nerves and the crudeness of its expression has nothing to do with its intensity.
Nathanael WestHe smoked a cigarette, standing in the dark and listening to her undress. She made sea sounds; something flapped like a sail; there was the creak of ropes; then he heard the wave-against-a-wharf smack of rubber on flesh. Her call for him to hurry was a sea-moan, and when he lay beside her, she heaved, tidal, moon-driven.
Nathanael WestBut whether he was happy or not was hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither.
Nathanael WestMan 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 WestHe 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 WestNo 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 WestYou 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 for me to tell where literature ends and I begin.
Nathanael WestBetty 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 WestHe thought of how calm he was. His calm was so perfect that he could not destroy it even by being conscious of it.
Nathanael WestAt 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 WestIt 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 WestPrayers for the condemned man will be offered on an adding machine. Numbers constitute the only universal language.
Nathanael West