Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Louis-Ferdinand Céline (May 27, 1894 – July 1, 1961) was a French author

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• If you aren't rich you should always look useful.
  • Journey to the End of the Night, 1932

• The natives, by and large, had to be driven to work with clubs, they preserved that much dignity, whereas the whites, perfected by public education, worked of their own free will.
  • Journey to the End of the Night, 1932

• I cannot refrain from doubting that there exist any genuine realizations of our deepest character except war and illness, those two infinities of nightmare.
  • Journey to the End of the Night, 1932

• The rich are inebriate in another way and cannot contrive to grasp these frenzied longings for security. To be rich is another form of intoxication: it spells forgetfulness. In fact, that is what one wants riches for: to forget.
  • Journey to the End of the Night, 1932

• We are, by nature, so futile that distraction alone can prevent us from dying altogether.
  • Journey to the End of the Night, 1932

• It's harder to lose the wish to love than the wish to live.
  • Journey to the End of the Night, 1932

• Almost every desire a poor man has is a punishable offence.
  • Journey to the End of the Night, 1932

• And the music came back with the carnival, the music you've heard as far back as you can remember, ever since you were little, that's always playing somewhere, in some corner of the city, in little country towns, wherever poor people go and sit at the end of the week to figure out what's become of them, sometimes here, sometimes there, from season to season, it tinkles and grinds out the tunes that rich people danced to the year before. It's the mechanical music that floats down from the wooden horses, from the cars that aren't cars anymore, from the railways that aren't at all scenic, from the platform under the wrestler who hasn't any muscles and doesn't come from Marseille, from the beardless lady, the magician who's a butter-fingered jerk, the organ that's not made of gold, the shooting gallery with the empty eggs. It's the carnival made to delude the weekend crowd.

We go in and drink the beer with no head on it. But under the cardboard trees the stink of the waiter's breath is real. And the change he gives you has several peculiar coins in it, so peculiar that you go on examining them for weeks and weeks and finally, with considerable difficulty, palm them off on some beggar. What do you expect at the carnival? Gotta have what fun you can between hunger and jail, and take things as they come. No sense complaining, we're sitting down aren't we? Which ain't to be sneezed at. I saw the same old Gallery of the Nations, the one Lola caught sight of years and years ago on that avenue in the park of Saint-Cloud. You always see things again at carnivals, they revive the joy of past carnivals. Over the years the crowds must have come back time and again to stroll on the main avenue of the park of Saint-Cloud...taking it easy. The war had been over long ago. And say I wonder if that shooting gallery still belonged to the same owner? Had he come back alive from the war? I take an interest in everything. Those are the same targets, but in addition, they're shooting at airplanes now. Novelty. Progress. Fashion. The wedding was still there, the soldier too, and the town hall with its flag. Plus a few more things to shoot at than before.

• Journey to the End of the Night, 1932

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• "The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so."

• "There's a point of poverty at which the spirit isn't with the body all the time. It finds the body really too unbearable. So it's almost as if you were talking to the soul itself. And a soul's not properly responsible."

• "Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it."

• "The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished."

• "With two thousand years of Christianity behind him... a man can't see a regiment of soldiers march past without going off the deep end. It starts off far too many ideas in his head."

• "To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!"

• "Living, just by itself - what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting - or he'll come along and nibble your brain."

• "I don't want to go to war for Hitler, I'll admit it, but I don't want to go against him, for the Jews ... You can bawl me out all you want, but it's the Jews and they alone who are dragging us to the firing line ... Hitler doesn't like the Jews, nor do I! There's no point getting all upset over so little ... It's no crime that they make you sick."

• "Behind all music we ought to try and catch that noiseless tone thats made for us, the melody of death."

• "The truth of this world is to die."

• "Like a dog, he had no idea of death."

• "Amidst so many unstable theories, so much contradictory data, the reasonable thing, when it comes down to it, is to make no definite choice."

Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it.

• "Life is nothing more than this disgusting experience where one's personality breaks up."

• "We get nowehere, it's been proved."

• "You must choose : either Dying or Lying."

• "One human being can only tolerate another human being, and rather like him, if he plays the part of an admiring doormat."

• "One might as well realize that in everyday life at least a hundred people thirst for your miserable life in the course of a single day."

• "You delve deeper into the night at first and start to panic, but you want to know all the same, and after that you don't come out of the depths."

• "Desertion for the artist means abandoning the concrete."

• "Our society is rotten, dying, ... we are flying towards facism."

• "There are only crys of Revolt and Hope. Hope for what ? That the shit will start to smell good."

• "To Croak quite free, that at least is man's work."

• "Scrape out your entrails, my heros !...come and have your breast stuffed, My brave ones !... All to the scrap heap, guts everywhere. the DeBraining is going to start."

• "Since the flood all Wars have been fought to the cries of optimism."

• "None face the "impossible confession", the pill that cannot be swallowed... that man is the worst of all species."

• "People always seem to be struggling in a general suicide."

• "Most authors use a "french" that is disgustingly elegant, moulded, oily, slippery like shit."

• "I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win."

• "The Bourgeois shits and he is hungry, thats all... the worker's ideal is to have twice as many bourgeois pleasures just for himself."

• "Men seem to feel a huge, absolutely unbearable terror that they will find themselves one fine day alone, quite alone, faced with nothingness."

• "Wherever you blind man and make him subservient to matter and make him exhaust himself for the sake of profit, straightaway hell breaks out."

• "Without incessant artistic creation by everyone, there can be no lasting society."

• "Fate towers so high above us, the squall carries us off like fleas in the water."

• "It is with great strokes of bravery that slaughterhouses are replenished."

• "One finishes up by shrivelling up like an animal and putting up with almost anything."

• "An Immense hatred keeps me alive... i would live for a thousand years if i were certain of seeing the whole world croak."

• "Better the eternal's brigadoon than the human calamitous empire, the mammoth schemeing molehill."

• "At a certain point of their misery people don't care a rap about understanding... they just feel."

• "All you are is a bundle of remorse swelling up, swelling up. Remorse for what...whom ?"

• "In circumstances of real tragedy you see things straight away...past, present, and future together."

• "Time's embroidery is music."

• "The earth just doesn't want men."

• "Death is only a cleaning machine."

• "The public is like a woman, it wants to be fucked."