Nathanael West Quotes
Art Is a Way Out. Do not let life overwhelm you. When the old paths are choked with the débris of failure, look for newer and fresher paths. Art is just such a path. Art is distilled from suffering.
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.
Every child, everywhere; in the whole world there was not one child who was not gravely, sweetly dancing.
Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.
Prayers for the condemned man will be offered on an adding machine. Numbers constitute the only universal language.
He felt as though his heart were a bomb, a complicated bomb that would result in a simple explosion, wrecking the world without rocking it.
Feeling is of the heart and nerves and the crudeness of its expression has nothing to do with its intensity.
He thought of how calm he was. His calm was so perfect that he could not destroy it even by being conscious of it.
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 read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain.
But whether he was happy or not was hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither.
Man 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.
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.
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.
Art Is One if Life's Richest Offerings. For those who have not the talent to create, there is appreciation.
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.
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.
