Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust Quotes

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“But the romantic atmosphere only heightened his feeling of icy fatness.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust

“He felt like a bottle that is being slowly filled with warm, dirty warter.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust

“All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while.”
― Nathanael West, 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, 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, Miss. Lonelyhearts And The Day Of The Locust

“or Mama’ll spank.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust

“It was a crazy jumble of dietary rules, economics and Biblical threats. He claimed to have seen”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust

“uncontaminated by thought.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust

“After they had eaten, while Homer was in the kitchen washing dishes, Tod got her to tell him what they did with themselves all day. She said that they lived quietly and that she was glad because she was tired of excitement. All she wanted was a career. Homer did the housework and she was getting a real rest. Daddy’s long sickness had tired her out completely. Homer liked to do housework and anyway he wouldn’t let her go into the kitchen because of her hands.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust

“malleability”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust

“Lo, thar,”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust

“She talked on and on, endlessly, about herself and about the picture business. He watched her, but didn’t listen, and whenever she repeated a question in order to get a reply, he nodded his head without saying anything.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust

“she pouting at his smile, neither one of them conscious of being cute.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust

“The party dress had given his simplified mind its cue and he delighted in the boy-and-girl argument that followed.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust

“He was giving birth to groups of words that lived”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust

“edification”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust

“He was a portrait painter, a man of genius, but…” He stopped listening”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust

“languorous”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust