Louis-Ferdinand Céline Quotes

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 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

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.

~ Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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.

~ Louis-Ferdinand Céline

The forest is only waiting for their signal to start trembling, hissing, and roaring from its depths. An enormous, love-maddened, unlighted railway station, full to bursting. Whole trees bristling with living noise makers, mutilated erections, horror.

~ Louis-Ferdinand Céline

History doesn't pass the dishes again.

~ Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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 Céline

Lovely sight, the Apocalypse! But absurdity, without limits? No Sir! there have to be certain limits...

~ Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it.

~ 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