Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Citations en anglais (Page 3)

“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.”

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Louis-ferdinand Céline

50
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“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.”

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12
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

“(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!”

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[6]
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

“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.”

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Source: Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Chapter 3

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

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Louis-ferdinand Céline

51
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“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.”

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Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

“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.”

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Louis-ferdinand Céline

219
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“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.”

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27
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

“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.”

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Louis-ferdinand Céline

128
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“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]”

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Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

“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.”

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

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

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Louis-ferdinand Céline

( « L'argot est né de la haine, il n'existe plus» Arts, 6. February 1957. in À l’agité du bocal et autres textes, (op. cit.) p. 55.

“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.”

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4
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

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

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[6]
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

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

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Louis-ferdinand Céline

March 30, 1947
Source: Letters to Milton Hindus (1947-1949), Les Cahiers de la NRF, Gallimard ISBN 2070134296

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

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Louis-ferdinand Céline

75
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

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

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17
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

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

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Louis-ferdinand Céline

Letters to Milton Hindus

“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.”

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Louis-ferdinand Céline

101
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

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

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Source: Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Chapter 2