Louis-Ferdinand Céline quotes - page 4

I clearly see you a tapeworm, but not a cobra, not a cobra at all...no good at the flute! (...) I'll go applaud you when you finally become a true monster, when you'll have paid them, the witches, what you have to, their price, so they transmute you, blossom you, into a true phenomenon. Into a tapeworm that plays the flute. (To the Fidgeting Lunatic) (Louis-Ferdinand Céline)
I don't think about anything," he says, "No thoughts at all! I think about not getting killed... that keeps me busy... One more day is one more day-That's what I think! View quote
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
It's harder to lose the wish to love than the wish to live.[7]. View quote
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
It is in the United States that one may better see, if one has the taste for it, the vast Jewish panic, the mad anguish that strangles, the camouflaged arrogance, at the slightest evocation of a possibility of their regulation for the general world-wide good.[50]. View quote
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
...personally I find Hitler, Franco, Mussolini fabulously debonaire, admirably magnanimous, infinitely more sympathetic...than 250 Nobel Prize winners. View quote
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
You pin-heads, you have not understood in communism its admirable, instantaneous manner of appeasing all your ruined tax-payer grudges ferociously, in the name of a new purity, a non-existent proletarian virtue, you deceived jackals. Your intimate personal plan won't wash. I am well acquainted with you. [128]. View quote
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
[The press from right to left, is corrupt. It will say anything if the bribe is large enough]...gloss over events according to the color of the subsidy, undress, attack, traduce, rant, all according to the sum in the envelope. [177]. View quote
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Only a complete alcoholic can think life is funny ... any life!. View quote
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I'd never have written a line. View quote
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
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. View quote
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
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 Céline)
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. View quote
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Medicine is a thankless profession. When you get paid by the rich, you feel like a flunky, by the poor like a thief. How can you take a fee from people who can't afford to eat or go to the movies? Especially when they're at their last gasp. It's not easy. You let it ride. You get soft-hearted. And your ship goes down. View quote
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
There's no tyrant like a brain. View quote
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
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. View quote
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
One can't relive one's life. Forgiveness is not what's difficult; one's always too ready to forgive. And it does no good, that's obvious. View quote
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
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. View quote
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
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. View quote
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Then I fell sick, I was delirious, driven mad by fear, they said at the hospital. Maybe so. 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. View quote
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Beating up Jews (by Jew I mean anyone with a Jew for a grandparent, even one!) won't help, I'm sure, that's just going around in circles, it's a joke, you're only beating around the bush if you don't grab them by the strings [tefillins], if you don't strangle them with them. View quote
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
[B]eing on the wrong side of history also served him a heaping plate of material for new work after 1945 when, in a trilogy of novels-D'un château l'autre (Castle to Castle, 1957), Nord (North, 1960), Rigodon (1961)-he chronicled a shattered world in ever more fragmented prose and honed his persecution complex via his increasingly deranged narrator. The writer who said he was only about style was in fact a revisionist historian, providing a rare and perversely instructive view of Vichy from the point of view of the defeated. His postwar novels are much more overtly political than the first two. They're also ventures into Holocaust denial: "Nuremberg," he wrote in D'un château l'autre, "needs redoing." (Louis-Ferdinand Céline)