Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.
Nathanael WestHer sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily. Moreover, his confusion was significant, whereas her order was not.
Nathanael WestTags: psychology
what goes on in the sea is of no interest to the rock
Nathanael WestI'm going to be a star some day," she announced as though daring him to contradict her.
"I'm sure you..."
"It's my life. It's the only thing in the whole world that I want."
"It's good to know what you want. I used to be a bookkeeper in a hotel,
but..."
"If I'm not, I'll commit suicide.
...all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust
Nathanael WestTags: disillusionment capitalism conformity social-commentary self-perception american-dream commercialization
Americans have dissipated their racial energy in an orgy of stone-breaking. In their few years they have broken more stones than did centuries of Egyptians, and they have done their work hysterically, desperately, almost as if they knew that the stones would some day break them.
Nathanael WestNo 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 WestOnly those who still have hope can benefit from tears.
Nathanael WestTags: hope
You once said to me that I talk like a man in a book. I not only talk, but think and feel like one. I have spent my life in books; literature has deeply dyed my brain its own colour. This literary colouring is a protective one--like the brown of the rabbit or the checks of the quail--making it impossible for me to tell where literature ends and I begin.
Nathanael WestThe sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies.
Nathanael West« first previous
Page 3 of 4.
next last »
Data privacy
Imprint
Contact
Diese Website verwendet Cookies, um Ihnen die bestmögliche Funktionalität bieten zu können.