Louis-ferdinand Céline Quotes

“Medicine is a thankless profession. When you get paid by the rich, you feel like a flunky, by the poor like a thief. How can you take a fee from people who can’t afford to eat or go to the movies? Especially when they’re at their last gasp. It’s not easy. You let it ride. You get soft-hearted. And your ship goes down.”

“This instinctive repulsion which tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the very rare consolations for being so impoverished which are given to those of us who don’t sell anything to anybody.”

“The best thing to do when you're in this world, don't you agree, is to get out of it. Crazy or not, scared or not.”

“If you aren't rich you should always look useful.”

“It is of men, and of them only, that one should always be frightened.”

“Poor people never, or hardly ever, ask for an explanation of all they have to put up with. They hate one another, and content themselves with that.”

“When you stay too long in the same place, things and people go to pot on you, they rot and start stinking for your special benefit.”

“People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them.”

“An unfamiliar city is a fine thing. That's the time and place when you can suppose that all the people you meet are nice. It's dream time.”

“The rich don't have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don't do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody's happy.”

“Life must go on, even if it's no joke… just pretend to believe in the future.”

“That is perhaps what we seek throughout life, that and nothing more, the greatest possible sorrow so as to become fully ourselves before dying.”

“only a complete alcoholic can think life is funny… any life!…”

“The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in, and to die without realizing how far people can go in the way of crumminess. When the grave lies open before us, let’s not try to be witty, but record the worst of human viciousness we’ve seen without changing one word. When that’s done, we can curl up our toes and sink into the pit. That’s work enough for a lifetime.”

“I believed in her body, I didn't believe in her soul. I though of Lola as a charming goldbrick, miles away from the war, miles away from life.”

“The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.”

“There's no tyrant like a brain.”

“Lots of men are like that, their artistic leanings never go beyond a weakness for shapely thighs.”

“I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.”

“The plain truth, I may as well admit it, is that I've never been really right in the head.”

“When it becomes really impossible to get away and sleep, then the will to live evaporates of its own accord.”

“You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past.”

“The beginning of genius is being scared shitless.”

“I warn you that when the princes of this world start loving you it means they are going to grind you up into battle sausage.”

“Love is like liquor, the drunker and more impotent you are, the stronger and smarter you think yourself and the surer you are of your rights.”

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

“Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.”

“When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves.”

“A man should be resigned to knowing himself a little better each day if he hasn't got the guts to put an end to his sniveling once and for all.”

“A God who counts minutes and pennies, a desperate sensual God, who grunts like a pig. A pig with golden wings, who falls and falls, always belly side up, ready for caresses, that’s him, our master. Come, kiss me.”

“In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavour, it's indispensable.”

“troubles are as endless as pleasures are brief…”

“We've no use for intellectuals in this outfit. What we need is chimpanzees. Let me give you a word of advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. We will think for you, my friend. Don't forget it.”

“There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism.”

“In circumstances of real tragedy you see things straight away… past, present, and future together.”

“To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe.”

“And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.”

“It is in the United States that one may better see, if one has the taste for it, the vast Jewish panic, the mad anguish that strangles, the camouflaged arrogance, at the slightest evocation of a possibility of their regulation for the general world-wide good.”

“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.”

“(Lola): Only mad men and cowards refuse to go to the war, when their homeland is in danger! - (Bardamu): So, hurrah for the mad men and the cowards!”

“The three radios, the six cars, the four refrigerators, the seven telephones in each of the 300,000 Jewish households, and the super-television!”

“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.”

“Our French Republic is no more than a great gullet swallowing the negroizing of the French at the command of the Jews. Our governors are a clique of sadistic yids and yellow-bellied masons sworn to swallow us up, to bastardize us further, to boil us down by all the grotesque, primitive means of inter-mixture, part negro, part yellow, part white, part red, part monkey, part Jewish, part everything.”

“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.”

“You pin-heads, you have not understood in communism its admirable, instantaneous manner of appeasing all your ruined tax-payer grudges ferociously, in the name of a new purity, a non-existent proletarian virtue, you deceived jackals. Your intimate personal plan won't wash. I am well acquainted with you.”

“I cannot refrain from doubting that there exist other genuine realizations of our deepest character than war and illness, those two infinities of nightmare. [39]”

“The one thing any of us really cared about was living for one more hour, one more hour is a big deal in a world where everything has reduced itself to murder.”

“Hate gave birth to the slang; Slang (‘argot’) exists not anymore.”

“The one who talks about the future is a rascal. The present is the only thing that matters. To invoke one’s posterity is to make a speech to maggots.”

“Everything interesting takes place in the dark; there is no doubt about it. We know nothing of the true story of the men.”

“I should be able to get the alligators to dance to the tune of the pan pipe.”

“The judeo-Americans are notorious idiots, bellylanding in foolishness: look at Roosevelt, Otto Khan, Morgenthau, Filene, Barush, Rosenthal…Observe these cunts.”

“We are, by nature, so futile that distraction alone can prevent us from dying altogether.”

“I should give all the works of Baudelaire for a female Olympic swimmer.”

“Your system of producing wealth, factories, mines, cooperatives will fall apart, like everything else, under the attacks of the people, in the delirious, popular boulimia.”

“You can be a virgin in horror the same as in sex.”

“The populace is a true museum of all the stupidities of the ages: it swallows everything, it admires everything, it preserves everything, it defends everything, it understands nothing.”

“I clearly see you a tapeworm, but not a cobra, not a cobra at all…no good at the flute! (…) I’ll go applaud you when you finally become a true monster, when you’ll have paid them, the witches, what you have to, their price, so they transmute you, blossom you, into a true phenomenon. Into a tapeworm that plays the flute.”

“In this society which we are induced to frequent, composed above all of politicians and artists, one cannot realize one's true worth.”

“Spiritually we are at ground zero, sunk, bored to perdition. All our arts prove it. Since the renaissance, so mechanized, we repeat with almost futile variants the same hackneyed sentimentalities (we call them eternal values!) Love! Re-love No Love! More Love!”

“Love is infinity - come down to poodles'level.”

“It's harder to lose the wish to love than the wish to live.”

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

“Anybody who talks about the future is a bastard, it's the present that counts.”

“[The press from right to left, is corrupt. It will say anything if the bribe is large enough]… gloss over events according to the color of the subsidy, undress, attack, traduce, rant, all according to the sum in the envelope. [177]”

“A woman who spends her time worrying about pregnancy is a virtual cripple; she'll never go very far.”