Louis-Ferdinand Céline quotes - page 4

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a French novelist and physician, renowned for his innovative literary style and controversial views. His works, including "Journey to the End of the Night," profoundly influenced modern literature with their raw language and bleak outlook. He remains one of the most debated figures in twentieth-century French literature. Here are 96 of his quotes:

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!

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

It's harder to lose the wish to love than the wish to live.[7].

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].

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

...personally I find Hitler, Franco, Mussolini fabulously debonaire, admirably magnanimous, infinitely more sympathetic...than 250 Nobel Prize winners.

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].

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].

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I'd never have written a line.

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.

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.

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.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

There's no tyrant like a brain.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline