Nathanael West · 185 pages
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“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, quote from Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust
“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, quote from Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust
“But whether he was happy or not was hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither.”
― Nathanael West, quote from Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust
“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.”
― Nathanael West, quote from Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust
“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, quote from Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust
“Like a dead man, only friction could make him warm or violence make him mobile.”
― Nathanael West, quote from Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust
“Crowds of people moved through the streets with a dream-like violence.”
― Nathanael West, quote from Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust
“The way to be gay is to make other people gay," Miss Lonelyhearts said. "Sleep with me and I'll be one gay dog.”
― Nathanael West, quote from Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust
“He felt like a bottle that is being slowly filled with warm, dirty warter.”
― Nathanael West, quote from Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust
“But the romantic atmosphere only heightened his feeling of icy fatness.”
― Nathanael West, quote from Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust
“It was on this trip that Faye acquired a new suitor by the name of Homer Simpson.”
― Nathanael West, quote from Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust
“Perhaps I can make you understand. Let’s start from the beginning. A man is hired to give advice to the readers of a newspaper. The job is a circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke. He welcomes the job, for it might lead to a gossip column, and anyway he’s tired of being a leg man. He too considers the job a joke, but after several months at it, the joke begins to escape him. He sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice, that they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator.”
― Nathanael West, quote from Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West
Born place: in New York City, The United States
Born date October 17, 1903
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“He was twenty. I remembered twenty. I'd known everything at twenty. It took me another year to realize I knew nothing. I was still hoping to learn something before I hit thirty, but I wasn't holding my breath.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, quote from Circus of the Damned
“We who are so lucky as to be born into the light - who see it every day and never think about it, we're blessed. We could have been born shadow souls who live and die in crimson darkness, never even knowing that somewhere there is something better.”
― L.J. Smith, quote from Shadow Souls
“A person's a person, no matter how small.”
― Dr. Seuss, quote from Horton Hears a Who!
“His face was tense, his jaw flexed as he stared at her. She could hardly stand to meet his eyes. They were an ocean of betrayal. They probed her, searching for the smallest sign that she didn't mean it. That spark of hope that never seemed to go out.”
― Aprilynne Pike, quote from Spells
“Sometimes you're the one speeding along in a panic, doing too much, not paying attention, wrecking things you don't mean to. And sometimes life just happens to you, and you can't dodge it. It crashes into you because it wants to see what you're made of.”
― Alexandra Bracken, quote from Never Fade
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