196 Quotes by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

"Buy Fable! the book that rejuvenates your soul! makes your belly belly-laugh! turns your cares to dust!...likewise your moods, woes an wounds!...turns everything rosy, deflates spleen and bile! pocondria! not just any old work! not just any old words! Fable!You gotta be categorical."

"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."

"Dreams rise in the darkness and catch fire from the mirage of moving light. What happens on the screen isn't quite real; it leaves open a vague cloudy space for the poor, for dreams and the dead. Hurry hurry, cram yourself full of dreams to carry you through the life that's waiting for you outside, when you leave here, to help you last a few days more in that nightmare of things and people. Among the dreams, choose the ones most likely to warm your soul."

"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."

"There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism."

"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."

"You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past."

"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."

"   "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!"

"Our life is a journey, through winter and night, We look for our way, in a sky without light. (Song of the Swiss Guards, 1793)"