Quotes from Louis-Ferdinand Celine

C'est peut-être ça qu'on cherche à travers les vie, rien que cela, le plus grand chagrin possible pour devenir soi-même avant de mourir.

only a complete alcoholic can think life is funny ... any life! ...

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.

In circumstances of real tragedy you see things straight away...past, present, and future together.

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 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...

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! ...

It is of men, and of them only, that one should always be frightened.

Most people don't die until the last moment; others start twenty years in advance, sometimes more. Those are the unfortunates.

The best way to make a sort of peace, a fragile armistice to be sure, but precious all the same, with men, officers or not, is to let them bask and wallow in childish self-glorification. There's no such thing as intelligent vanity. It's an instinct. And you'll never find a man who is not first and formenost vain. The role of admiring doormat is about the only one that one man is glad to tolerate in another. With these soldiers I had no need to tax my imagination.

Maybe what makes life so terribly fatiguing is nothing other than the enormous effort we make for twenty years, forty years, and more, to be reasonable, to avoid being simply, profoundly ourselves, that is, vile, ghastly, absurd. It's the nightmare of having to represent the halt subhuman we were fobbed off with as a small-size universal ideal, a superman from morning to night.

When you write, you should put your skin on the table.

People avenge themselves for the favors done them.

La jeunesse vraie, la seule, c'est d'aimer tout le monde sans distinction, cela seulement est vrai, cela seulement est jeune et nouveau.

A woman who spends her time worrying about pregnancy is a virtual cripple, she'll never go very far.

The coldest most rational scientific madness is also the most intolerable. But when a man has acquired a certain ability to subsist, even rather scantily, in a certain niche with the help of a few grimaces, he must either keep at it or resign himself to dying the death of a guinea pig. Habits are acquired more quickly than courage, especially the habit of filling one's stomach.

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.

A body always tells the truth, that's why it's usually depressing and disgusting to look at.

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.

Nearly all a poor bastard's desires are punishable by jail.

Frankly, just between you and me, I'm ending up even worse than I started...

Travel is useful, it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our 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, just a fictitious narrative. Littre says so and he's never wrong. And besides, in the first place, anyone can do as much. You just have to close your eyes. It's on the other side of life.

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.

They came from the four corners of the earth, driven by hunger, plague, tumors, and the cold, and stopped here. They couldn't go any futrther because of the ocean. That's France, that's the French people.