Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. 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.
Louis-Ferdinand CelinePeople don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them.
Louis-Ferdinand CelineTo philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe.
Louis-Ferdinand CelineThe best way to make a sort of peace, a fragile armistice to be sure, but precious all the same, with men, officers or not, is to let them bask and wallow in childish self-glorification. Thereโs no such thing as intelligent vanity. Itโs an instinct. And youโll never find a man who is not first and formenost vain. The role of admiring doormat is about the only one that one man is glad to tolerate in another. With these soldiers I had no need to tax my imagination.
Louis-Ferdinand CelineI 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 Celine