Quotes from Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Well, you know... experience is a muffled lantern that throws light only on the bearer...it's incommunicable...

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.

In my room I'd barely closed my eyes when the blonde from the movie house came along and sang her whole song of sorrow just for me. I helped her put me to sleep, so to speak, and succeeded pretty well... I wasn't entirely alone... It's not possible to sleep alone...

Chin up, Ferdinand, I kept saying to myself, to keep up my courage. What with being chucked out of everywhere, you're sure to find whatever it is that scares all those bastards so. It must be at the end of the night, and that's why they're so dead set against going to the end of the night.

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

Here we are, alone again. It's all so slow, so heavy, so sad. . . I'll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They've talked. They haven't said much. They've gone away. They've grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world.

La plupart des gens ne meurent qu'au dernier moment ; d'autres commencent et s'y prennent vingt ans d'avance et parfois davantage.

I wish the storm would make even more of a clatter, I wish the roofs would cave in, that spring would never come again, and that the house would blow down.

He couldn't have explained this misery of his, it exceeded his education.

Beauty is like drink or comfort, once you get used to it, you stop paying attention.

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.

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.

Lie, copulate, and die.

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 …

Everything that's important goes on in the darkness, no doubt about it. We never know anyone's real inside story.

You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.

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.

reason died in 1914, November 1914 ... after that everybody began to rave ...

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.

We're even more dazed than usual. Here we sit, empty, bewildered, contented. We have nothing to talk about, because nothing happens to us anymore, we're too poor, maybe life is sick of us. Why not?

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)

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.

Those people were pushing life and night and day in front of them. Life hides everything from people. Their own noise prevents them from hearing anything else. They couldn't care less. The bigger and taller the city, the less they care. Take it from me. I've tried. It's a waste of time.

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.