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Prayers for the condemned man will be offered on an adding machine. Numbers constitute the only universal language.

Nathanael West

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Nathanael West
Age: 37 †
Born: 1903
Born: October 17
Died: 1940
Died: December 22
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Numbers
Prayers
Prayer
Offered
Language
Mathematical
Men
Machine
Math
Machines
Constitute
Mathematics
Adding
Universal
Condemned

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Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.
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Let him ride a horse. He's a cowboy ain't he?
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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.
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Feeling is of the heart and nerves and the crudeness of its expression has nothing to do with its intensity.
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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.
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Every child, everywhere in the whole world there was not one child who was not gravely, sweetly dancing.
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Man spends a great deal of time making order out of chaos, yet insists that the emotions be disordered. I order my emotions: I am insane.
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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.
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Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears.
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But whether he was happy or not was hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither.
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It's solitary drinking that makes drunkards.
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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.
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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.
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