52 Quotes by Nathanael West

Let him ride a horse. He's a cowboy ain't he?

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.

Furthermore, having lost faith in himself, he thought it his duty to undermine the nation's faith in itself.

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

...better a live bird in the jungle of the body than two stuffed birds on the library table.

Love is but a flitting shadow, a lure, a gimcrack, a kickshaw.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

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.

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.