Nathanael West - The Day of the Locust (1939)

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Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.

Nathanael West
He 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 West
Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears. When they finish, they feel better. But to those without hope, whose anguish is basic and permanent, no good comes from crying. Nothing changes for them. They usually know this, but still can't help crying.

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

Nathanael West
Feeling is of the heart and nerves and the crudeness of its expression has nothing to do with its intensity.

Nathanael West
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 West
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.

Nathanael West
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.

Nathanael West
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.

Nathanael West
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.

Nathanael West
On the Hollywood studio system:
A sargasso of the imagination!

Nathanael West
Art Is a Way Out. Do not let life overwhelm you. When the old paths are choked with the debris of failure, look for newer and fresher paths. Art is just such a path. Art is distilled from suffering.

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

Nathanael West
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.

Nathanael West