He thought of how calm he was. His calm was so perfect that he could not destroy it even by being conscious of it.
Nathanael WestFeeling is of the heart and nerves and the crudeness of its expression has nothing to do with its intensity.
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 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 West