Nathanael West said this quote

“ ...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. ”

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Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears.

~ Nathanael West

He read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain.

~ Nathanael West

Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.

~ Nathanael West

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