Miss Lonelyhearts Quotes

“He read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“He's an escapist. He wants to cultivate his interior garden.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“Art Is a Way Out. Do not let life overwhelm you. When the old paths are choked with the débris of failure, look for newer and fresher paths. Art is just such a path. Art is distilled from suffering.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily. Moreover, his confusion was significant, whereas her order was not.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“Humanity...I'm a humanity lover. All the broken bastards...”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on eath. Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will percieve the divine mystery in things. Once you percieve it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“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, Miss Lonelyhearts

“He was giving birth to groups of words.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“what goes on in the sea is of no interest to the rock”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“It's solitary drinking that makes drunkards.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“He knew now what this thing was — hysteria, a snake whose scales are tiny mirrors in which the dead world takes on a semblance of life. And how dead the world is . . . a world of doorknobs. He wondered if hysteria were really too steep a price to pay for bringing it to life.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt.
What the little park needed, even more than he did, was a drink. Neither alcohol nor rain would do. Tomorrow, in his column, he would ask Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Desperate, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband and the rest of his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up, flowers that smelled of feet.
"Ah, humanity..." But he was heavy with shadow and the joke went into a dying fall. He trist to break its fall by laughing at himself.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“Every child, everywhere; in the whole world there was not one child who was not gravely, sweetly dancing.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“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, Miss Lonelyhearts

“He did not feel guilty. He did not feel. The rock was a solidification of his feeling, his conscience, his sense of reality, his self-knowledge.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“But now let us consider the holes in our own bodies and into what these congenital wounds open. Under the skin of man is a wondrous jungle where veins like lush tropical growths hang along over-ripe organs and weed-like entrails writhe in squirming tangles of red and yellow. In this jungle, flitting from rock-gray lungs to golden intestines, from liver to lights and back to liver again, lives a bird called the soul.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“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, Miss Lonelyhearts: Or the Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin

“His heart was a rose and in his skull another rose bloomed.
The room was full of grace. A sweet, clean grace, not washed clean, but clean as the innersides of the inner petals of a newly forced rosebud.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“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, Miss Lonelyhearts

“Art Is One if Life's Richest Offerings. For those who have not the talent to create, there is appreciation.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“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, Miss Lonelyhearts

“Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts: Or the Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin

“...the gray sky looked as if it had been rubbed with a soiled eraser. It held no angels, flaming crosses, dove-bearing doves, wheels within wheels. Only a newspaper struggled in the air like a kite with a broken spine. He got up and started again for the speakeasy.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“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 the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another.”
― Nathanael West, MISS LONELYHEARTS

“Americans have dissipated their radical energy in an orgy of stone breaking.”
― Nathanael West, MISS LONELYHEARTS

“Men have always fought their misery with dreams. Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio and newspapers. Among many betrayals, this is the worst.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“He sees that the majority of letters are profoundly humble pleas fpr moral and spiritual advixe, 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 examinatin shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not the perpetator.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“He felt like an empty bottle that is being slowly filled with warm, dirty water.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

“Oh, Lord, we are not of those who wash in wine, water, urine, vinegar, fire, oil, bay rum, milk, brandy, or boric acid. Oh, Lord, we are of those who wash solely in the Blood of the Lamb.”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts