Top 40 Nathanael West Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Numbers constitute the only universal language.”

— Nathanael West

2. “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

3. “He read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain.”

— Nathanael West

4. “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.”

— Nathanael West

5. “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

6. “Feeling is of the heart and nerves and the crudeness of its expression has nothing to do with its intensity.”

— Nathanael West

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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.”

— Nathanael West

Featured in: Romance Quotes

10. “Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while.”

— Nathanael West

11. “Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play. From in front, the stupid lines and grotesque situations would have made him squirm with annoyance, but because he saw the perspiring stagehands and the wires that held up the tawdry summerhouse with its tangle of paper flowers, he accepted everything and was anxious for it to succeed.”

— Nathanael West

12. “Let him ride a horse. He’s a cowboy ain’t he?”

— Nathanael West

13. “Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears.”

— Nathanael West

14. “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.”

— Nathanael West

15. “Crowds of people moved through the streets with a dream-like violence.”

— Nathanael West

16. “She wasn’t hard-boiled. It was just that she put love on a special plane, where a man without money or looks couldn’t move.”

— Nathanael West

17. “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

18. “We must take the long view – every defeat is a victory in a war of attrition.”

— Nathanael West

19. “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

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

— Nathanael West

21. “A button machine makes buttons, no matter what the power used, foot, steam or electricity. They, no matter what the motivating force, death, love or God, made jokes.”

— Nathanael West

22. “Every child, everywhere; in the whole world there was not one child who was not gravely, sweetly dancing.”

— Nathanael West

23. “But whether he was happy or not it is hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither. He had memories to disturb him and a plant hasn’t, but after the first bad night his memories were quiet.”

— Nathanael West

24. “It was on this trip that Faye acquired a new suitor by the name of Homer Simpson.”

— Nathanael West

25. “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.”

— Nathanael West

26. “Prayers for the condemned man will be offered on an adding machine. Numbers constitute the only universal language.”

— Nathanael West

27. “Like a dead man, only friction could make him warm or violence make him mobile.”

— Nathanael West

28. “It’s solitary drinking that makes drunkards.”

— Nathanael West

29. “All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while.”

— Nathanael West

30. “Once he had tried to get fired by recommending suicide in his column. All that Shrike had said was : “Remember, please, that you job is to increase the circulation of our paper. Suicide, it is only reasonable to think, must defeat this purpose”.”

— Nathanael West

31. “But whether he was happy or not was hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither.”

— Nathanael West

32. “Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily. Moreover, his confusion was significant, whereas her order was not.”

— Nathanael West

33. “Humanity... I’m a humanity lover. All the broken bastards...”

— Nathanael West

34. “Tod didn’t laugh at the man’s rhetoric. He knew it was unimportant. What mattered were his messianic rage and the emotional response of his hearers. They sprang to their feet, shaking their fists and shouting.”

— Nathanael West

35. “He felt like a bottle that is being slowly filled with warm, dirty warter.”

— Nathanael West

36. “Love is but a flitting shadow, a lure, a gimcrack, a kickshaw.”

— Nathanael West

37. “As he stood smiling, a little wave crept up out of the general welter and splashed at his feet for attention. It was Betty.”

— Nathanael West

38. “What a perfect escape the return to the womb was. Better by far than Religion or Art or the South Sea Islands. It was so snug and warm there, and the feeding was automatic.”

— Nathanael West

39. “Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.”

— Nathanael West

40. “At the sight of their heroes and heroines, the crowd would turn demoniac. Some little gesture, either too pleasing or too offensive, would start it moving and then nothing but machine guns would stop it. Individually the purpose of its members might simply to be to get a souvenir, but collectively it would grab and rend.”

— Nathanael West