Quotes by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Theres something sad about people going to bed. You can see they dont give a damn whether theyre getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they dont even try to understand what were here for. They just dont care.

Who is the true friend of the people? Fascism is. Who has done the most for the working man? The USSR or Hitler? Hitler has... Who has done the most for the small businessman? Not Thorez but Hitler!

I hadnt found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

Death after all is only a matter of a few hours, a few minutes, but a pension is like poverty, it lasts a whole lifetime. Rich people are drunk in a different way, they cant understand this frenzy about security. Being rich is another kind of drunkenness, the forgetful kind. That, in fact, is the whole point of getting rich: to forget.

Dreams rise in the darkness and catch fire from the mirage of moving light. What happens on the screen isnt quite real; it leaves open a vague cloudy space for the poor, for dreams and the dead. Hurry hurry, cram yourself full of dreams to carry you through the life thats waiting for you outside, when you leave here, to help you last a few days more in that nightmare of things and people. Among the dreams, choose the ones most likely to warm your soul.

The forest is only waiting for their signal to start trembling, hissing, and roaring from its depths. An enormous, love-maddened, unlighted railway station, full to bursting. Whole trees bristling with living noise makers, mutilated erections, horror.

Of course the people in the metro didnt see a thing!...what a joke! petrified ratlets! but theyll still come out to refute me! make claims!...that nothing got bombed!...squished! powdered! that the firmament was calm, and me, I imagined the whole thing! chrysanthemums, sprays, roses! why, theres no more any such thing as sky-hooking shrapnel than there is anal ice cream! its all in my mind! hallucinations and bullshit! what a crook! but I repeat and reassert! shrapnel and fiery lace stretched from one end of the horizon to the other! with lots of glow-worms mixed in...and dancing purple fireflies...

Lovely sight, the Apocalypse! But absurdity, without limits? No Sir! there have to be certain limits...

“Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasnt enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. Ive never been able to kill myself.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Here we are, alone again. Its all so slow, so heavy, so sad. . . Ill be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. Theyve talked. They havent said much. Theyve gone away. Theyve grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world.”