"Let him ride a horse. He's a cowboy ain't he?"
— Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust)

"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 (Miss Lonelyhearts)

"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 (Miss Lonelyhearts)

"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 (Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust)

"Numbers constitute the only universal language."
— Nathanael West

"He felt like a bottle that is being slowly filled with warm, dirty warter."
— Nathanael West (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 (Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust)

"The sun is a joke."
— Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust)

"Like a dead man, only friction could make him warm or violence make him mobile."
— Nathanael West (Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust)

"But the romantic atmosphere only heightened his feeling of icy fatness."
— Nathanael West (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 (Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust)

"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 (Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust)

"Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. 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 a germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while."
— Nathanael West (Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust)

"Crowds of people moved through the streets with a dream-like violence."
— Nathanael West (Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust)

"He read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain."
— Nathanael West (Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust)

"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 (Miss Lonelyhearts)