Quotes from Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Whether you're making love to the ladies or postulating the infinite, you'll still get all flabby one day!

let's not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of the human viciousness we've seen without changing one word.

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.

We keep going, we fuel and refuel, we pass on our life to a biped of the next century, with frenzy, at any cost, as if it were the greatest of pleasures to perpetuate ourselves, as if, when all's said and done, it would make us immortal.

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; He's our lord and master!

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.

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.

Maybe that's what we look for all our lives, the worst possible grief, to make us truly ourselves before we die.

our frenzy to persist in our present state—that's the unconscionable torture.

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. We'd burst if we had the courage, day after day we come very close to it. The atomic torture we love so is locked up inside us with our pride.

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.

I tried to gauge the degree of hopelessness to which I had fallen. I couldn't.

you've probably noticed that after the first half-century practically everybody gets leaky, they can't keep it in ... hence the cruelty of long drawn-out meals and drinking sessions ... ships and apartment houses are the same ... everything starts to leak ... sphincters, bladders, drain pipes, bowels ... the half-century is merciless for ladies and gentlemen ... worse for dogs and cats! ... with them it comes sooner! ... five ... six years ...

Hiçbir ÅŸey aç?klanamaz. Dünyan?n tek bildiÄŸi ÅŸey uyurken bir o yana bir bu yana dönen biri gibi sizi öldürmektir, dünya uyurken üstünüze aband???nda, uyuyan birinin pireleri ezdiÄŸi gibi. Böylesine bir ölüm pek ahmakça olurdu, diye düÅŸündüm, herkes gibi yani. Ä°nsanlara güvenmek demek kendini az?c?k öldürtmekle eÅŸdeÄŸerdir.

Wherever you may be, the moment you draw the attention of the authorities, the best thing you can do is disappear in a hurry.

Ce monde n' est je vous l'assure qu'une immense entreprise à se foutre du monde!

Tu finiras sûrement par le trouver le truc qui leur fait si peur, à eux tous, à tous ces salauds là, autant qu'ils sont et qui doit être au bout de la nuit, et c'est pour ça qu'ils n'y vont pas, au bout de la nuit.

Pliny paid for his phenomena!...I've paid a bit, too...everything worthwhile has its cost!...if it's free, you're down with the shithead fraternity! blabbermouths, charlatans, the whole gang!...into the crapper with 'em! every one! right in the shitter!...it's unlistenable!...just a bunch of farts!...I'm telling you!...

On est puceau de l'horreur comme on l'est de la volupté.

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.

Lo mejor que puedes hacer, verdad, cuando estás en este mundo, es salir de él. Loco o no, con miedo o sin él.

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.

Now I know... we have at least two friends!... Cillie von Leiden and the hunchback... not bad in our situation... or, come right down to it, no matter where and when, peace, dead calm, wars, convulsions... so many vaginas, stomachs, cocks, snouts, and flies you don't know what to do with them... shovelsful!... but hearts?... very rare!

I'm recapitulating...condensing...it's the Readers Digest style...people only have time to read thirty pages...apparently!...maximum!...that's all they have time for! they horse around for sixteen hours out of twenty-four, they sleep, they copulate the rest, where would they find the time to read a hundred pages? oh, do caca, I forgot! as well!