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Louis-ferdinand Céline Quotes
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches , a French novelist, pamphleteer and physician. He developed a new style of writing that modernized French literature. His most famous work is the 1932 novel, Journey to the End of the Night.

Céline used a working-class, spoken style of language in his writings, and attacked what he considered to be the overly polished, "bourgeois" language of the "academy". His works influenced a broad array of literary figures, not only in France but also in the English-speaking world and elsewhere in the Western World; this includes authors associated with modernism, existentialism, black comedy and the Beat Generation.

However, Céline's vocal support for the Axis powers during the Second World War and his authorship of some offensively antisemitic pamphlets, has meant that his legacy as a cultural icon is a tangled one.

✵ 27. May 1894 – 1. July 1961
Louis-ferdinand Céline photo
Louis-ferdinand Céline: 88 quotes12 likes

Louis-ferdinand Céline Quotes

“Since the end of the period of belief, leaders exalt every defect, every kind of sadism, and gain all the more through their vices: vanity, ambition, war, death in a word.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

16
Mea culpa; suivi de la vie et l'oeuvre de Semmelweis (1937)

“[Industrialized man, drunk on alcohol and gasoline, becomes a confusion of sheep, bull and hyena. ] Charming. The least obstructed little asshole looks on himself in the mirror as Jupiter. [18]”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

Mea culpa; suivi de la vie et l'oeuvre de Semmelweis (1937)

“Above all communism is a poetic vocation. Without poetry, without a burning, purifying altruistic fervor, communism is only a farce, the receptacle of all anger, of all plebian resentment, the decadent playhouse of sharks, of all the tragic pimps, of all Jews, performing their Talmudic imposture.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

130
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“Even the richest, the most superb. They continue to offer themselves. Indeed, their life is no more than a perpetual whoredom, more or less decorative, more or less seedy, more or less affected, sumptuous, pretentious.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

299
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“As far as they were concerned, gunfire was nothing but noise. That’s why wars can keep going. Even the people who make them, who fight in them, don’t really get the picture. Even with a bullet in their gut, they’d go on picking up old shoes that “might come in handy.” The way a sheep, lying on its side in a meadow, will keep on grazing with its dying breath. Most people don’t die until the last moment; others start twenty years in advance, sometimes more. Those are the unfortunates.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Chapter 4

“In democratic politics it is money that commands. And the money is Jewish.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

180
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“The rich don't have to kill to eat.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

[30]
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

“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.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

32
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

“{Music symbolizes the loss of faith, of common belief. ] The small, intimate church is closed, the organs are dead, it is sadder than before. Only those whom fate designs for the eternal mass of infinite love remain. They compose only a very small chapel of clarity in space and time.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

45
Mea culpa; suivi de la vie et l'oeuvre de Semmelweis (1937)

“Almost every desire a poor man has is a punishable offence.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

16
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

“[The fascist states want no war] Why? Because the fascist states realize before our very eyes, among Aryans, without gold, without Jews, without Freemasons, the famous socialist program, of which the communists have had their mugs full and have never brought off. [100]”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“I don't think about anything," he says, "No thoughts at all! I think about not getting killed… that keeps me busy… One more day is one more day-That's what I think!”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Chapter 4

“Politics has putrified mankind more profoundly in the last three centuries than in the whole of pre-history. We were more united in the middle ages than we are today; then a common spirit took form.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

16
Mea culpa; suivi de la vie et l'oeuvre de Semmelweis (1937)

“You [Jews] terrify no one. The sun sinks, you swank about to the right, to the left. Europe forms up against you.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

294
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“To be or not to be" Aryan? That is the question! And nothing more! All the doctrines concerning the absence of Race, concerning the vast racial confusion, all the spreading of racial jumbling at full pace, the esperanto-ism of the anus "Romain Rolland style," resulting in the greatest fornicating Babel are no more than destructive foul tricks, all emerging from the same Talmudic shop: "To the destruction of the Whites.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“…personally I find Hitler, Franco, Mussolini fabulously debonaire, admirably magnanimous, infinitely more sympathetic…than 250 Nobel Prize winners.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“God is being repaired.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book L'École des cadavres

L'École des cadavres (School for Corpses), Denoël 1942, p. 6