Top 100 Louis-Ferdinand Celine Quotes
#1. The whole business of your life overwhelms you when you live alone. One's stupefied by it. To get rid of it you try to daub some of it off on to people who come to see you, and they hate that. To be alone trains one for death.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#2. Silks" ... "China" ... "Men's Suits" ... but what about canes? ... or crutches?
"Oh, certainly ... yes, yes, of course ... third floor ...
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#3. If it is your duty to croak like the toad, then
go ahead! And with all your might! Make them
hear you!
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#4. I do not like war, because war happens in the countryside, and the countryside bores me.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#6. The serious scientific public trusted him implicitly and consequently had no need to read him. If those people were to start getting critical, no further progress would be possible. They would spend a whole year over every page.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#7. Buy Fable! the book that rejuvenates your soul! makes your belly belly-laugh! turns your cares to dust! ... likewise your moods, woes an wounds! ... turns everything rosy, deflates spleen and bile! pocondria! not just any old work! not just any old words! Fable!
You gotta be categorical.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#8. With two thousand years of Christianity behind him ... a man can't see a regiment of soldiers march past without going off the deep end. It starts off far too many ideas in his head.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#9. 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.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#10. An Immense hatred keeps me alive ... i would live for a thousand years if i were certain of seeing the whole world croak.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#11. After all, when our egoism lets us go for a while, when it comes time to throw it off, the only women whose memory you cherish in your hearts are the ones who really loved men a little, not just one man, even if it was you, but the whole lot. When
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#12. Things are different when you go back to them, they seem to have more power to enter into us more sadly, more deeply, more gently than before, to merge with the death which is slowly, pleasantly, sneakily growing inside us, and which we train ourselves to resist a little less each day.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#13. A few poetic regrets, if adroitly placed, are as becoming to a woman as gossamer hair in the moonlight. What
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#14. We never change. Neither our socks nor our masters nor our opinions, or we're so slow about it that it's no use. We were born loyal and that's what killed us! Soldiers free of charge, heroes for everyone else, talking monkeys, tortured words, we are the minions of King Misery ... It's not a life.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#15. 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.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#16. Travel is very useful and it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our own journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength. It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It's a novel, simply a fictitious narrative.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#18. This body of ours, this disguise put on by common jumping molecules, is in constant revolt against the abominable farce of having to endure. Our molecules, the dears, want to get lost in the universe as fast as they can! It makes them miserable to be nothing but "us," the jerks of infinity.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#21. 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.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#22. To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#23. Our life is a journey, through winter and night, We look for our way, in a sky without light. (Song of the Swiss Guards, 1793)
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#24. I hadn't 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.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#25. But maybe it's wrong of me to complain ... I'm alive after all ... and I lose an enemy or two every day ... cancer, apoplexy, gluttony ... it's a pleasure the number that pass on! ... I'm not hard to please ... a name! ... another! ... there are good things in life ...
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#26. 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.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#29. 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.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#30. For the poor of this world, two major ways of expiring are available: either by the absolute indifference of your fellow-men in peace-time, or by the homicidal passion of these same when war breaks out.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#32. 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.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#33. 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.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#34. There are certain advantages in being cursed by all and sundry ... especially, it dispenses you with having to be nice to anybody ... there's nothing more emollient, stultifying, emasculating than wanting to be liked ... "not nice!" ... that does it, you're free! ...
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#35. But women aren't just bodies! ... boor! they're "companions" as well! what of their charms, their grace, their twitterings? sure, sure! if suicide appeals to you ...
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#36. After conscientiously tasting fritters every day for a month Lola had put on two pounds! Her little belt bore witness to the disaster, she found herself obliged to move on to the next notch. She burst into tears.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#39. All that makes a lunatic are the very ordinary ideas of mankind shut up inside a man's head.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#40. So many vaginas, stomachs, cocks, snouts, and flies you don't know what to do with them ... shovelsfull! ... but hearts? ... very rare! in the last five hundred million years too many cocks and gastric tubes to count ... but hearts? ... on your fingers! ...
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#41. Businessmen all think of themselves as big or little professional wizards, but in practice they usually turn out to be hopeless incompetents.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#42. Never be picky and choosy about means of escaping disembowelment, or waste your time trying to find reasons for the persecution you're a victim of. Escape is good enough for the wise.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#43. At the bottom of all music you have to hear the tune without notes, made just for us, the tune of Death.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#44. Most people don't die until the last moment; others start twenty years in advance, sometimes more. Those are the unfortunates.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#45. 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.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#46. 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 Celine
#47. Love, Arthur, is a poodle's chance of attaining the infinite, and personally I have my pride.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#50. Anybody who talks about the future is a bastard, it's the present that counts. Invoking posterity is like making speeches to worms.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#52. Compared with the addiction to perfect forms, cocaine is a pastime for stationmasters. But
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#53. I cannot refrain from doubting that there exist any genuine realizations of our deepest character except war and illness, those two infinities of nightmare.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#54. Well, you know ... experience is a muffled lantern that throws light only on the bearer ... it's incommunicable ...
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#55. The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#56. The nights in Billancourt were soft and sweet, enlivened now and again by those childish airplane or zeppelin alarms which provided the civilian population with thrills and self-justification.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#57. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#58. Whenever they get a chance, never fear, people make you waste hours and months ... they use you as a wall to bounce their bullshit off of ... blah! and blah! and blahblahblah! ... you put up with it for an hour, you'll need two weeks to recover ... blah! blah!
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#59. The poetry of heroism holds an irresistible appeal for people who aren't involved in a war, especially when they're making piles of money out of one.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#61. Life, the true mistress of all real men - would have tricked me as it tricks everyone else. We
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#62. Near the kiosk the old lady who sold refreshments seemed slowly to be gathering all the shadows of evening about her skirts.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#63. The new world, the communo-bourgeois, sermonizing, Tartuffian, automobilistic, alcoholic, gluttonous and cancerous world has only two anxieties: ass and bank account ...
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#64. Never believe straight off in a man's unhappiness. Ask him if he can still sleep. If the answer's "yes," all's well. That is enough.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#65. That street was like a dismal gash, endless, with us at the bottom of it, filling it from side to side, advancing from sorrow to sorrow, toward an end that is never in sight, the end of all the streets in the world.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#66. I was rather fond of her, but I was even fonder of my vices, my mania for running away from everywhere in search of God knows what, driven, I suppose, by stupid pride, by a sense of some sort of superiority
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#68. There's a point of poverty at which the spirit isn't with the body all the time. It finds the body really too unbearable. So it's almost as if you were talking to the soul itself. And a soul's not properly responsible.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#71. Suddenly he fell asleep in the candlelight. After a while I got up to look at his face. He slept like everybody else. He looked quite ordinary. There ought to be some mark by which to distinguish good from the bad.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#72. The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#73. The main thing isn't knowing whether you're right or wrong. That really doesn't matter ... The main thing is to keep people from bothering you ... The rest is eyewash ...
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#74. Our trouble isn't lack of perseverance, it's that we're not on the right road that leads to an easy death. Going
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#75. 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.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#79. Let's not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of the human viciousness we've seen without changing one word.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#80. There's no such thing as intelligent vanity. It's an instinct. And you'll never find a man who is not first and foremost vain.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#81. Children don't know the law. Their parents slap them to teach them the law and protect them from pleasure. There's
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#82. If you've got plenty of nerve, you're all set, because then you're entitled to do practically anything at all, you've got the majority on your side, and it's the majority who decide what's crazy and what isn't.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#83. what? When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves. From
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#84. I was a hundred-percent sick, I felt as if I had no further use for my legs, they just hung over the edge of my bed like unimportant and rather ridiculous objects.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#86. A slap or a fat check is what it takes if you want to see all the passions that go beating about behind a face take a sudden tack. It's as beautiful as watching a sailing ship maneuvering in a stormy sea. The whole person keels over in the changed wind.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#87. Everything that's important goes on in the darkness, no doubt about it. We never know anyone's real inside story.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#88. A woman who spends her time worrying about pregnancy is a virtual cripple, she'll never go very far.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#89. Whether you're making love to the ladies or postulating the infinite, you'll still get all flabby one day!
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#90. In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavor, it's indispensable.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#92. Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#93. Since life consists of madness spiked with lies, the farther you are from each other the more lies you can put into it and the happier you'll be. That's only natural and normal. Truth is inedible.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#94. You know about innards? The trick they play on tramps in the country? They stuff an old wallet with putrid chicken innards. Well, take it from me, a man is just like that, except that he's fatter and hungrier and can move around, and inside there's a dream.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#95. The mother sensed her daughter's animal superiority and instinctively condemned it out of hand, the unforgettable depth of her fucking, her way of coming like a continent!
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#96. Laziness is almost as compelling as life. The new farce you're having to play crushes you with its banality, and all in all it takes more cowardice than courage to start all over again.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#97. When I think now of all the lunatics I knew at Baryton's, I can't help suspecting that the only two manifestations of our innermost being are war and insanity, those two absolute nightmares.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#99. Maybe that's what we look for all our lives, the worst possible grief, to make us truly ourselves before we die.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
