Louis-Ferdinand Céline Quotes

The natives, by and large, had to be driven to work with clubs, they preserved that much dignity, whereas the whites, perfected by public education, worked of their own free will.

God is being repaired.

Why struggle, waiting is good enough, since thievery is bound to end up in the street. Basically, only the street counts. Why deny it? It's waiting for us. One of these days we'll have to make up our minds and go down in to the street, not one or two or three of us, but all. We stand on the brink, we simper and fuss, but never mind, the time will come.

The one thing any of us really cared about was living for one more hour, one more hour is a big deal in a world where everything has reduced itself to murder.

The populace is a true museum of all the stupidities of the ages: it swallows everything, it admires everything, it preserves everything, it defends everything, it understands nothing.

L'École des cadavres (School for Corpses), Denoël 1942, p. 6

"The rich don't have to kill to eat." –

I should give all the works of Baudelaire for a female Olympic swimmer.

I cannot refrain from doubting that there exist other genuine realizations of our deepest character than war and illness, those two infinities of nightmare.

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

Reported in Céline à Meudon : transcriptions des entretiens avec Jacques d'Arribehaude et Jean Guenot. Éditions Jean Guenot, 1995

The rich are inebriate in another way and cannot contrive to grasp these frenzied longings for security. To be rich is another form of intoxication: it spells forgetfulness. In fact, that is what one wants riches for: to forget.

I believed in her body, I didn't believe in her soul. I thought of Lola as a charming goldbrick, miles away from the war, miles away from life.

You [Jews] terrify no one. The sun sinks, you swank about to the right, to the left. Europe forms up against you.

...personally I find Hitler, Franco, Mussolini fabulously debonaire, admirably magnanimous, infinitely more sympathetic...than 250 Nobel Prize winners.