A man should be resigned to knowing himself a little better each day if he hasn't got the guts to put an end to his sniveling once and for all.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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 Céline

Anybody who talks about the future is a bastard, it's the present that counts. Invoking posterity is like making speeches to worms.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

A poor man in this world can be done to death in two main ways, by the absolute indifference of his fellows in peacetime or by their homicidal mania when there's a war.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

...apparently "London" gave out my address! That's what they're saying...not just London, though! Brazzaville, too!...and said that I'm a dirty pornographer...a fetch besides being the most despicable traitor of the century!... I'd make a urinal blush! That what we need is to cleanse France and the French language of this smut-writing, demoralizing, grammaclast who's sullying our sacred homeland and its literary heritage!

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

A woman who spends her time worrying about pregnancy is a virtual cripple, she'll never go very far.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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.

— 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, 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

 "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!

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline