A Quote by Nathanael West

Crowds of people moved through the streets with a dream-like violence. — © Nathanael West
Crowds of people moved through the streets with a dream-like violence.
It is no solution to define words as violence or prejudice as oppression, and then by cracking down on words or thoughts pretend that we are doing something about violence and oppression. No doubt it is easier to pass a speech code or hate-crimes law and proclaim the streets safer than actually to make the streets safer, but the one must never be confused with the other... Indeed, equating "verbal violence" with physical violence is a treacherous, mischievous business.
Why don't I like crowds? I suppose the worst possible thing I could say is that I don't like people, and that crowds are just collections of people. That seems like a very nihilistic way to look at the world.
Sometimes my life opened its eyes in the dark. A feeling as if crowds drew through the streets in blindness and anxiety on the way towards a miracle, while I invisibly remain standing.
Obviously, not everybody who dies becomes a ghost, otherwise those who are psychic would be aware of shouldering through deep crowds of assorted shades every time they moved.
No-one wants to see violence of any kind on our streets, certainly not any violence that's justified by extreme nationalist ideas or that targets people because of their religion.
What I wanted to do was to look at the powerlessness that I felt as - and continue to feel at times - as a black man in the American streets. I know what it feels like to walk through the streets, knowing what it is to be in this body and how certain people respond to that body.
Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence--religious meaning--apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.
My childhood is streets upon streets upon streets upon streets. Streets to define you and streets to confine you, with no sign of motorway, freeway or highway.
I'm no reporter. That's for the man with a suit and tie. I'm just relating to my people the best way I know, bringing them what they know and what they see out on the streets. I'm bringing it to them in a musical way, through a way of partying rather than violence. Now they can party their way through their problems.
California always had been a dream to me. I guess growing up in the 70s with movies like Vanishing Point, The Getaway, and Badlands formed the need for me to leave Germany for California. I'd never even visited before I moved there. When I moved to Los Angeles in 1996 right away I felt at home. Everything was in place and the dream was alive.
Walking the streets of Tokyo with Hawking in his wheelchair ... I felt as if I were taking a walk through Galilee with Jesus Christ [as] crowds of Japanese silently streamed after us, stretching out their hands to touch Hawking's wheelchair. ... The crowds had streamed after Einstein [on Einstein's visit to Japan in 1922] as they streamed after Hawking seventy years later. ... They showed exquisite choice in their heroes. ... Somehow they understood that Einstein and Hawking were not just great scientists, but great human beings.
I am told, in a dream you can only get the answer to all your questions through a dream. So in my dream, I fall asleep, and I dream, in my dream, that I'm having that absolute, revealing dream.
A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.
Crowds of bees are giddy with clover Crowds of grasshoppers skip at our feet, Crowds of larks at their matins hang over, Thanking the Lord for a life so sweet.
Let's think about Mexican streets: they're unsafe because of violence, so people stay at home. Does that make streets more or less safe? Less safe! So streets become more desolate and unsafe, so we stay home more - which makes streets even more desolate and unsafe, and we stay home even more.
I'm really interested in violence. And I think there's an inevitably cinematic property that violence brings to the moviegoing experience. But one still has to be thoughtful and mature about how you depict it and how you think it through. You have to think about the effects that violence has on audiences, and it's deployed so casually that I think it's losing its meaning. And when things like violence and murder and the dehumanization of other people lose their meaning, then we're really kind of in a place where we have to reexamine and take a hard look at ourselves.
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