Celine Ferdinand Quotes & Sayings

The best way to make a sort of peace, a fragile armistice to be sure, but precious all the same, with men, officers or not, is to let them bask and wallow in childish self-glorification. There's no such thing as intelligent vanity. It's an instinct. And you'll never find a man who is not first and formenost vain. The role of admiring doormat is about the only one that one man is glad to tolerate in another. With these soldiers I had no need to tax my imagination. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

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. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Since life consists of madness spiked with lies, the farther you are from each other the more lies you can put into it and the happier you'll be. That's only natural and normal. Truth is inedible. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Love, Arthur, is a poodle's chance of attaining the infinite, and personally I have my pride. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

There's no tyrant like a brain. Below — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Life must go on, even if it's no joke ... just pretend to believe in the future. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

An unfamiliar city is a fine thing. That's the time and place when you can suppose that all the people you meet are nice. It's dream time. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

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. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The coldest most rational scientific madness is also the most intolerable. But when a man has acquired a certain ability to subsist, even rather scantily, in a certain niche with the help of a few grimaces, he must either keep at it or resign himself to dying the death of a guinea pig. Habits are acquired more quickly than courage, especially the habit of filling one's stomach. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

But women aren't just bodies! ... boor! they're "companions" as well! what of their charms, their grace, their twitterings? sure, sure! if suicide appeals to you ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The old men from the charity hospital next door would come jerking past our rooms, making useless, disjointed leaps. They'd go from room to room, spitting out gossip between their decayed teeth, purveying scraps of malignant worn-out slander. Cloistered in their official misery as in an oozing dungeon, those aged workers ruminated the layer of shit that long years of servitude deposit on men's souls. Impotent hatreds grown rancid in the pissy idleness of dormitories. They employed their last quavering energies in hurting each other a little more. In destroying what little pleasure they had left.
Their last remaining pleasure! Their shriveled carcasses contained not one solitary atom that was not absolutely vicious! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

I have never voted in my life ... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Beauty is like drink or comfort, once you get used to it, you stop paying attention. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Reason died in 1914, November 1914 ... after that everybody began to rave ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The mind is satisfied with phrased, but not the body, the body is more fastidious, it wants muscles. A body always tells the truth, that's why it's usually depressing and disgusting to look at. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

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 Celine

A man should be resigned to knowing himself a little better each day if he hasn't got the guts to put an end to his sniveling once and for all. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Of course the people in the metro didn't see a thing! ... what a joke! petrified ratlets! but they'll still come out to refute me! make claims! ... that nothing got bombed! ... squished! powdered! that the firmament was calm, and me, I imagined the whole thing! chrysanthemums, sprays, roses! why, there's no more any such thing as sky-hooking shrapnel than there is anal ice cream! it's all in my mind! hallucinations and bullshit! what a crook! but I repeat and reassert! shrapnel and fiery lace stretched from one end of the horizon to the other! with lots of glow-worms mixed in ... and dancing purple fireflies ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Most people die at the last minute; others twenty years beforehand, some even earlier. They are the wretched of the earth. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

A God who counts minutes and pennies, a desperate sensual God, who grunts like a pig. A pig with golden wings, who falls and falls, always belly side up, ready for caresses, that's him, our master. Come, kiss me. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

When you write, you should put your skin on the table. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Here's the truth, simply stated ... bookstores are suffering from a serious crisis of falling sales. Don't believe a single zero of all those editions claimed to be 100,000! 40,000! ... even 400 copies! just for the suckers! Alack! ... Alas! ... only love and romance ... and even then! ... manage to keep selling ... and a few murder mysteries ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The whole business of your life overwhelms you when you live alone. One's stupefied by it. To get rid of it you try to daub some of it off on to people who come to see you, and they hate that. To be alone trains one for death. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

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. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

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. When the grave lies open before us, let's not try to be witty, but on the other hand, let's not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of the human viciousness we've seen without changing one word. When that's done, we can curl up our toes and sink into the pit. That's work enough for a lifetime. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

He went on talking to me in the darkness, while I retraced the steps of my past with the sound of his voice as a charm with which to open the doors of the years and months and finally of my days, wondering where I could have run into this man. But I found nothing. No answer. 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. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

It is, I believe, one of the few dangerous forms of eccentricity, a highly contagious mania, to be precise, of the rampant social variety! In your friend's case, we may not yet be dealing with out-and-out insanity ... No ... Maybe his trouble is only exaggerated conviction ... But the contagious manias are well known to me! ... I've known a good many sufferers from conviction mania ... Of many different types ... And in the last analysis, those who talk about justice seem to be the maddest of the lot! ... At first, I must confess, I took a certain interest in justice fanatics ... Today those particular maniacs annoy and exasperate me more than I can tell ... Don't you feel the same way? ... Human beings show a strange aptitude for transmitting this mania. It terrifies me, and we find it, mind you, in all human beings! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

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

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. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Never believe straight off in a man's unhappiness. Ask him if he can still sleep. If the answer's "yes," all's well. That is enough. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

When I think now of all the lunatics I knew at Baryton's, I can't help suspecting that the only two manifestations of our innermost being are war and insanity, those two absolute nightmares. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The beginning of genius is being scared shitless. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

If you've got plenty of nerve, you're all set, because then you're entitled to do practically anything at all, you've got the majority on your side, and it's the majority who decide what's crazy and what isn't. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Laziness is almost as compelling as life. The new farce you're having to play crushes you with its banality, and all in all it takes more cowardice than courage to start all over again. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

That's the way it goes. You can't deny it, men have a hard time doing all that's demanded of them: butterflies in their youth, maggots at the end. I — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The foreground in a picture is always unattractive ... Art demands that the interest of the canvas should be placed in the far distance, where lies take refuge, those dreams which blossom out of fact and are man's only love. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

We went there to grope for our happiness, which all the world was threatening with the utmost ferocity. We were ashamed of wanting what we wanted, but something had to be done about it all the same. Love is harder to give up than life. In this world we spend our time killing or adoring, or both together. "I hate you! I adore you!" 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. One way or another, kissing is as indispensable as scratching. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

I've got quite a memory. Engraved in my mind, things are. I can't forget anything ... It's not a sign of intelligence ... Nothing to boast about, memory ... that's just how it is ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Lovely sight, the Apocalypse! But absurdity, without limits? No Sir! there have to be certain limits ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The new world, the communo-bourgeois, sermonizing, Tartuffian, automobilistic, alcoholic, gluttonous and cancerous world has only two anxieties: ass and bank account ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

All in all, death is something like marriage. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

There's a point of poverty at which the spirit isn't with the body all the time. It finds the body really too unbearable. So it's almost as if you were talking to the soul itself. And a soul's not properly responsible. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

But when you are week the best way to fortify yourself is to strip the people you fear of the last bit of prestige you're still inclined to give them. Learn to consider them they are, worse than they are in fact and from every point of view. That will release you, set you free, protect you more than you can possibly imagine. It will give you another self. There will be two of you.
That will strip their words and deeds of the obscene mystical fascination that weakens you and makes you waste your time. From then on you'll find their act no more amusing, no more relevant to your inner progress than that of the lowliest pig. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

A slap or a fat check is what it takes if you want to see all the passions that go beating about behind a face take a sudden tack. It's as beautiful as watching a sailing ship maneuvering in a stormy sea. The whole person keels over in the changed wind. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

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 ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

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 Celine

They were conscientious, you couldn't deny it, and they were also flabby, heartless sons-of-bitches. In other words, they were well chosen, as mindlessly enthusiastic as any employer could dream of. Sons that would have delighted my mother, worshiping their bosses, if only she could have had one all to herself, a son she could have been proud of in the eyes of the world, a real legitimate son. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Let's not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of the human viciousness we've seen without changing one word. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Architecture is the alpha principle of all arts. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Children don't know the law. Their parents slap them to teach them the law and protect them from pleasure. There's — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Lili, I think, saw so many human tragedies all around her ... people arranged it between them ... this was what they wanted ... none of her business ... animal miseries were different ... nobody paid any attention, but for her money only the animals counted ... time has passed, water under the bridge ... all in all I'd say she was right ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

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! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

In fatigue and solitude men emanate the divine. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

You can find something funny in anything! I'm sick as a dog and falling to bits, but I'll give up joking only after I give up the ghost! my last gasp! The proof, here, with only an eighth of a glimmer of light, things oozing out of my asshole, my armpits, and the elbows, too, blood coming out of the eyes, from the soupy mess of my grave, me whistling a tune, that's what you'll hear! A regular blackbird! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Travel is useful, it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.
It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It's a novel, just a fictitious narrative. Littre says so and he's never wrong.
And besides, in the first place, anyone can do as much. You just have to close your eyes.
It's on the other side of life. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

There are certain advantages in being cursed by all and sundry ... especially, it dispenses you with having to be nice to anybody ... there's nothing more emollient, stultifying, emasculating than wanting to be liked ... "not nice!" ... that does it, you're free! ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

When, grown older, we look back on the selfishness of the people who've been mixed up with our lives, we see it undeniably for what it was, as hard as steel or platinum and a lot more durable than time itself. As — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

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. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Maybe I'd never see him again ... maybe he'd gone for good ... swallowed up, body and soul, in the kind of stories you hear about ... Ah, it's an awful thing ... and being young doesn't help any ... when you notice for the first time ... the way you lose people as you go along ... the buddies you'll never see again ... never again ... when you notice that they've disappeared like dreams ... that it's all over ... finished ... that you too will get lost someday ... a long way off but inevitably ... in the awful torrent of things and people ... of the days and shapes ... that pass ... that never stop ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

We're workers, they say. Work, they call it! That's the crummiest part of the whole business. We're down in the hold, heaving and panting, stinking and sweating our balls off, and meanwhile! Up on deck in the fresh air, what do you see?! Our masters having a fine time with beautiful pink and perfumed women on their laps. They send for us, we're brought up on deck. They put on their top hats and give us a big spiel like as follows: "You no-good swine! We're at war! Those stinkers in Country No. 2! We're going to board them and cut their livers out! Let's go! Let's go! We've got everything we need on board! All together now! Let's hear you shout so the deck trembles: 'Long live Country No. 1!' So you'll be heard for miles around. The man that shouts the loudest will get a medal and a lollipop! Let's — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The plain truth, I may as well admit it, is that I've never been really right in the head. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

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 ... The rest is eyewash ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

"Fine! Fine! I'm listening ... but it's not very interesting! ...
"Oh, that's what you think! that's what you think! but nothing is very interesting, dear Professor Y! jot this down! take some notes!"
"What notes?"
"Just write! ... that if it weren't for wars, alcohol, blood pressure and cancer, the people in our atheistic Europe would soon be bored to death of life! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

It happened, you see, after the war, when I saw people making money while the others were dying in the trenches. You saw it and you couldn't do anything about it. Then later I was at the League of Nations, and there I saw the light. I really saw the world was ruled by the Golden Calf, by Mammon! Oh, no kidding! Implacably. Social consciousness certainly came to me late. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

A woman who spends her time worrying about pregnancy is a virtual cripple, she'll never go very far. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

I have no ideas, myself! Not a one! there's nothing more vulgar, more common, more disgusting than ideas! libraries are loaded with them! and every sidewalk cafe! ... the impotent are bloated with ideas! ... they dazzle youth with ideas! they play the pimp! ... and youth is ever ready, as you know, Professor, to gobble up anything, to go OOH! and AAH! by the numbers! How those pimps have an easy job of it! the passionate years of youth are spent getting a hard on and gargling ideeaas! ... philosophies, if you prefer! ... yes sir, philosophies! youth loves sham just as young dogs love those sticks, like bones, that we throw and they run after! they race forward, yipping away, wasting their time, that's the main thing! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Love ... is a poodle's chance of attaining the infinite ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Only a complete alcoholic can think life is funny ... any life! ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The worst part is wondering how you'll find the strength tomorrow
to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much
too long, where you'll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it's treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. 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. I've never been able to kill myself. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

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. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

She knew her duty inside and out. The prosperity of the cash drawer brought happiness to husband and wife. Not that Madame Puta was bad looking, not at all, she could even, like so many others, have been rather pretty, but she was so careful, so distrustful that she stopped short of beauty just as she stopped short of life - her hair was a little too well dressed, her smile a little too facile and sudden, and her gestures a bit too abrupt or too furtive. You racked your brains trying to figure out what was too calculated about her and why you always felt uneasy when she came near you. This instinctive revulsion that shopkeepers inspire in anyone who goes near them who knows what's what, is one of the few consolations for being as down at heel as people who don't sell anything to anybody tend to be. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Whenever they get a chance, never fear, people make you waste hours and months ... they use you as a wall to bounce their bullshit off of ... blah! and blah! and blahblahblah! ... you put up with it for an hour, you'll need two weeks to recover ... blah! blah! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it's the transparency that counts. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

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 Celine

Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Hjalmar ... is holding him, he'd put the handcuff on him ... one, not two ... he only had one ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

For the poor of this world, two major ways of expiring are available: either by the absolute indifference of your fellow-men in peace-time, or by the homicidal passion of these same when war breaks out. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Poverty is a giant, it uses your face like a mop to wipe away the world's garbage. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Two years is the time it takes to perceive at one glance, a glance as sure as instinct, the ugliness that can come over a face, even one that was delicious in its day. For — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

We've no use for intellectuals in this outfit. What we need is chimpanzees. Let me give you a word of advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. We will think for you, my friend. Don't forget it. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Flowing water makes men meditative. They urinate with a sense of eternity like sailors. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

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

Businessmen all think of themselves as big or little professional wizards, but in practice they usually turn out to be hopeless incompetents. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

People cling to their rotten memories, to all their misfortunes, and you can't pry them loose. These things keep them busy. They avenge themselves for the injustice of the present by smearing the future inside them with this shit. They're cowards deep down, and just. That's their nature. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

A time comes when you're all alone, when you've come to the end of everything that can happen to you. It's the end of the world. Even grief, your own grief, doesn't answer you anymore, and you have to retrace your steps, to go back among people, it makes no difference who. You're not choosy at times like that, because even to weep you have to go back where everything starts all over, back among people. "What — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Who is the true friend of the people? Fascism is. Who has done the most for the working man? The USSR or Hitler? Hitler has ... Who has done the most for the small businessman? Not Thorez but Hitler! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Love is like liquor, the drunker and more impotent you are, the stronger and smarter you think yourself and the surer you are of your rights. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

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 — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Lots of men are like that, their artistic leanings never go beyond a weakness for shapely thighs. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

They die of love - inside. After — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

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. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

what? When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves. From — Louis-Ferdinand Celine