Quotes from Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Ce qui guide encore le mieux, c'est l'odeur de la merde.

L'amour c'est l'infini mis à la portée des caniches et j'ai ma dignité moi !

Men are the thing to be afraid of, always, men and nothing else.

Il y avait ces cent sous entre nous . Ça suffit pour haïr, cent sous, et désirer qu'ils crèvent tous. Pas d'amour à perdre dans ce monde, tant qu'il y aura cent sous .

Telling it all after the fact...easier said than done!...much easier!

Invoking posterity is like making speeches to worms.

Interrupted again! if it's not Jules it's the cat! that's the female speciality: interruptions!

That's how I am! eyes peeled, scientific! first things first! the big ones! the small ones!...if they're going to behead you...for example!...you don't take your eyes of the guillotine!...look, the blade's dull! -Executioner! you shout, hey, you lazy fucker! don't you have anyone sharpening that thing? And the executioner scurries off, shit-assed and sheepish!

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.

Her alanda as?l yenilgi unutmakt?r, özellikle de sizi neyin gebertmiÅŸ olduÄŸunu unutmak,insanlar?n ne derece h?rt olduklar?n? asla anlayamadan gebermektir.

The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in, and to die without realizing how far people can go in the way of crumminess.

There's something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don't give a damn whether they're getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don't even try to understand what we're here for. They just don't care. Americans or not, they sleep no matter what, they're bloated mollusks, no sensibility, no trouble with their conscience.

Priests know how to bury the worst scandals.

Flowing water makes men meditative. They urinate with a sense of eternity like sailors.

You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It's frightening how many people and things there are in a man's past that have stopped moving. The living people we've lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all. As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.

What more did I want, after all, than my daily bread and some time to myself? Happiness in short.

People, countries, and objects all end up as smells.

If you've lived this long, it's because you've squashed any poetry you had in you.

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.

At the bottom of all music you have to hear the tune without notes, made just for us, the tune of Death.

Over our heads, two millimetres, maybe one millimetre from our temples, those long tempting lines of steel that bullets make when they're out to kill you were whistling through the hot summer air. I'd never felt so useless as I did amid all those bullets in the sunlight. A vast and universal mockery.

Her kentte böyle yerler vard?r iÅŸte, o kadar sersemce çirkindirler ki, orada hemen her zaman yaln?zs?n?zd?r

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...

He was crushed by his enormous resignation, that basic quality that makes it as easy to kill poor bastards in and out of the army as to let them live. 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.