Louis-Ferdinand Céline cytaty

strona 2

„Ten świat, to jest tylko olbrzymie przedsiębiorstwo gwizdania na świat.”

„Gdy nienawiść ludzka nie grozi żadnym ryzykiem, ich głupota szybko da się przekonać. Motywy same przychodzą.”

„Osaczony zewsząd nawałem nakazów, zwyczajów, pragnień, pełen pogmatwanych i zepchniętych w podświadomość instynktów, człowiek – a ściślej jego pozycja, stała się na tyle niebezpieczna, na tyle niewymiarowa, arbitralna, tak zarazem tragiczna i groteskowa, że nigdy jeszcze napisanie powieści nie było rzeczą łatwiejszą. Ale też i powstająca literatura jest rozpaczliwie nieznośna. Otaczają nas narody nadwrażliwych przygłupów, najmniejszy wstrząs może wywołać nie kończące się, mordercze konwulsje.”

„Na mój pogrzeb niech nikt nie przyjdzie. Wszyscy będą z tego zadowoleni, a ja najbardziej. Skromność przede wszystkim.”

„Najdalej dojdzie ten, kto podąża samotnie.”

„W tym fachu dawania się zabijać nie trzeba być wymagającym, trzeba to robić tak, jakby życie toczyło się dalej, to jest najcięższe, to kłamstwo.”

„Muskuły, Ferdynandzie, bez ducha nie są warte nawet tyle co koń! A duch bez muskułów to tyle co elektryczność bez przewodu! Nie wiadomo, jak ją uchwycić! Rozprasza się! To jest rozrzutność…”

„U Rabelais'go fajne jest to, że oddałby własną skórę, że ryzykował. Śmierć czyhała na niego bez przerwy, a śmierć nieźle inspiruje. To chyba jedyna rzecz, która może inspirować, wiem o tym, zwłaszcza gdy jest tutaj, tuż za plecami. Rozgniewana.”

„W małej jadalni, tuż obok, ujrzałem ojca, który chodził od jednej ściany do drugiej. Widać było, że jeszcze nie wypracował sobie odpowiedniej postawy, że nie był do końca gotów na tę okoliczność. Być może czekał, aż wydarzenia same się wyklarują, i że łatwiej mu będzie wtedy coś postanowić. Trwał tak, i stał jak nad przepaścią, niezdecydowany. Ludzie przechodzą od jednej sztuki do drugiej. W międzyczasie sztuka nie jest jeszcze gotowa, a ludzie nie potrafią dobrze jeszcze odróżnić jej zarysów, nie znają ról, jakie mają w niej odegrać, więc stoją tak, z opuszczonymi rękami, przed tym, co się dzieje na ich oczach, z instynktem złożonym jak parasol, poruszając się niezbornie, zredukowani do samych siebie, to znaczy, że zredukowani do nicości.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”