Louis-Ferdinand Celine Quotes
-
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.
→ -
When you're not used to comfort and good things to eat, you're intoxicated by them in no time. Truth's only too pleased to leave you. Very little is ever needed for Truth to let go of you. And after all, you're not really very keen to keep hold of it.
→ -
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.
→ -
Love is the infinite placed within the reach of poodles. I have my dignity!
→ -
When you stop to examine the way in which our words are formed and uttered, our sentences are hard-put to it to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins.
→ -
There's no such thing as intelligent vanity. It's an instinct. And you'll never find a man who is not first and foremost vain.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
It is of men, and of them only, that one should always be frightened.
→ -
I piss on you all from a considerable height.
→ -
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.
→ -
So many vaginas, stomachs, cocks, snouts, and flies you don't know what to do with them ... shovelsfull! ... but hearts? ... very rare! in the last five hundred million years too many cocks and gastric tubes to count ... but hearts? ... on your fingers!.
→ -
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.
→ -
Reason died in 1914, November 1914 ... after that everybody began to rave.
→ -
All that makes a lunatic are the very ordinary ideas of mankind shut up inside a man's head.
→ -
In circumstances of real tragedy you see things straight away...past, present, and future together.
→ -
Chin up, Ferdinand," I kept saying to myself, to keep up my courage. "What with being chucked out of everywhere, you're sure to find whatever it is that scares all those bastards so. It must be at the end of the night, and that's why they're so dead set against going to the end of the night.
→ -
Troubles are as endless as pleasures are brief.
→ -
Man hardly comes in more than two varieties, wherever he is, whatever he does: workers and pimps ... they're either one or the other! ... and inventors, the worst kind of jobholder! ... they stand condemned! ... the writer who doesn't pimp along, peacefully plagiarizing, who doesn't pump out the pop stuff, he's had it! ... everybody hates him!
→ -
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.
→ -
I was a hundred-percent sick, I felt as if I had no further use for my legs, they just hung over the edge of my bed like unimportant and rather ridiculous objects.
→ -
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.
→ -
Love, Arthur, is a poodle's chance of attaining the infinite, and personally I have my pride.
→ -
When it becomes really impossible to get away and sleep, then the will to live evaporates of its own accord.
→ -
In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavor, it’s indispensable.
→ -
This instinctive repulsion which tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the very rare consolations for being so impoverished which are given to those of us who don’t sell anything to anybody.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
All great innovations are built on rejections.
→ -
When you stay too long in the same place, things and people go to pot on you, they rot and start stinking for your special benefit.
→
Related Authors
-
Stendhal Writer -
Andre Gide Author -
William Faulkner Writer -
Arthur Rimbaud Poet -
Albert Camus Author -
Guy de Maupassant Writer -
Franz Kafka Writer -
Andre Malraux Novelist -
Henry Miller Writer -
Jean-Paul Sartre Philosopher -
Emile Zola Writer -
Ernest Hemingway Author -
Charles Bukowski Poet -
William S. Burroughs Novelist -
John Fante Novelist -
Marcel Proust Novelist -
Charles Baudelaire Poet -
Celine Dion Singer -
Jean Genet Novelist -
Honore de Balzac Novelist