196 Quotes by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Il n'y a pas de vanité intelligente.

Death after all is only a matter of a few hours, a few minutes, but a pension is like poverty, it lasts a whole lifetime. Rich people are drunk in a different way, they can't understand this frenzy about security. Being rich is another kind of drunkenness, the forgetful kind. That, in fact, is the whole point of getting rich: to forget.

Les gens riches à Paris demeurent ensemble, leurs quartiers, en bloc, forment une tranche de gâteau urbain dont la pointe vient toucher au Louvre, cependant que le rebord rebondi s'arrête aux arbres entre le Pont d'Auteuil et la Porte des Ternes. Voilà. C'est le bon morceau. Tout le reste n'est que peine et fumier.

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.