Top 100 Louis Celine Quotes
#1. 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
#3. That's the way it goes. You can't deny it, men have a hard time doing all that's demanded of them: butterflies in their youth, maggots at the end. I
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#5. 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
#6. People cling to their rotten memories, to all their misfortunes, and you can't pry them loose. These things keep them busy. They avenge themselves for the injustice of the present by smearing the future inside them with this shit. They're cowards deep down, and just. That's their nature.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#9. 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
#11. 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
#13. 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
#14. All that makes a lunatic are the very ordinary ideas of mankind shut up inside a man's head.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#16. Lovely sight, the Apocalypse! But absurdity, without limits? No Sir! there have to be certain limits ...
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#17. 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
#20. There's something very pleasant about a language you don't understand ... It's like a fog swirling around in our thoughts ... It's nice, it's like a dream, there's really nothing better ... It's fine as long as the words stay in the dream ...
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#21. 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
#23. 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 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.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#24. A village, even a small one, takes at least all night to burn, in the end it looks like an enormous flower, then there's only a bud, and after that nothing.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#25. Beauty is like drink or comfort, once you get used to it, you stop paying attention.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Compared with the addiction to perfect forms, cocaine is a pastime for stationmasters. But
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#29. They'd put their flesh and spirit into that house of theirs, like a snail. But the snail doesn't know what he's doing. The
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#31. Two years is the time it takes to perceive at one glance, a glance as sure as instinct, the ugliness that can come over a face, even one that was delicious in its day. For
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#33. The mechanical effort of conversation is nastier and more complicated than defecation.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#34. 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
#38. Love, Arthur, is a poodle's chance of attaining the infinite, and personally I have my pride.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#40. 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
#41. Most people don't die until the last moment; others start twenty years in advance, sometimes more. Those are the unfortunates.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#42. 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
#43. The mind is satisfied with phrased, but not the body, the body is more fastidious, it wants muscles. A body always tells the truth, that's why it's usually depressing and disgusting to look at.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#44. 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
#45. When, grown older, we look back on the selfishness of the people who've been mixed up with our lives, we see it undeniably for what it was, as hard as steel or platinum and a lot more durable than time itself. As
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#46. There would be nothing but darkness, same darkness as everywhere else, an enormous darkness that swallowed up the road two steps ahead of us, only a little sliver of road about the size of your tongue was spared by the darkness.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#50. Poverty is a giant, it uses your face like a mop to wipe away the world's garbage.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#51. 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
#52. A few poetic regrets, if adroitly placed, are as becoming to a woman as gossamer hair in the moonlight. What
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#53. The soul is the body's vanity and pleasure as long as the body's in good health, but it's also the urge to escape from the body as soon as the body is sick or things go badly.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#54. 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
#55. When you're not used to comfort and good things to eat, you're intoxicated by them in no time. Truth's only too pleased to leave you. Very little is ever needed for Truth to let go of you. And after all, you're not really very keen to keep hold of it.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#57. 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!
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#58. A poor man in this world can be done to death in two main ways, by the absolute indifference of his fellows in peacetime or by their homicidal mania when there's a war.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#59. The best thing to do when you're in this world, don't you agree, is to get out of it. Crazy or not, scared or not.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#61. Interrupted again! if it's not Jules it's the cat! that's the female speciality: interruptions!
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#70. I do not like war, because war happens in the countryside, and the countryside bores me.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#72. 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
#73. Flowing water makes men meditative. They urinate with a sense of eternity like sailors.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#74. My one and only chicken, bequeathed to me by Robinson, dreaded the noon hour the same as I did, he'd go back in with me. For three weeks the chicken lived with me like that, following me like a dog, clucking constantly, seeing snakes wherever he went. One day of extreme boredom, I ate him.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#75. Silks" ... "China" ... "Men's Suits" ... but what about canes? ... or crutches?
"Oh, certainly ... yes, yes, of course ... third floor ...
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#77. This instinctive repulsion which tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the very rare consolations for being so impoverished which are given to those of us who don't sell anything to anybody.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#80. 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
#81. 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
#83. One little second of pleasure, a whole life of pain ... my mother knew nothing of the pleasures of a good roll in the hay ... she missed out on all that ... like me, her son ... a lifetime of sacrifice! ... the woman who can grunt and rave in the throes of a deep fuck can die happy ...
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#89. 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
#91. Love is like liquor, the drunker and more impotent you are, the stronger and smarter you think yourself and the surer you are of your rights.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#93. 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
#96. I'd seen too many troubling things to be easy in my mind. I knew too much and not enough. I'd better go out, I said to myself, I'd better go out again.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#97. 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
#98. Truth is a pain which will not stop. And the truth of this world is to die. You must choose: either dying or lying. Personally, I have never been able to kill myself.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#99. 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
#100. 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
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