Here we are, alone again. It's all so slow, so heavy, so sad. . . I'll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They've talked. They haven't said much. Furthermore, they've gone away. Furthermore, they've grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

I don't have to worry about Madame Ouch! She'll still be robbing me blind when she's dead!...having made her last confession and received extreme unction...all the cataclysms will pass over her without harming a single gray hair on her head! It's a paradise here for scum like her, on earth as there is in heaven...they don't really die, the sluts, the hussies, the really awful ones, they just go from one paradise to another, with their money, servants, cars...just buy their cute little ticket and off they go! Final absolution and see you later! They shit in your hands!...they're born to slip out of both tells - the one here and the one in the next world...all they do is fuck and whine...loads of cash! Never broke!...cheers! Here's to you! No regrets! You realize too late...

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

I'd take cyanide no problem if it was that or throwing a cat out in the street, even a moth-eaten, mangy, caterwauling pain in the ass! I'd rather have the thing in bed with me than see it suffer on my account...though when it comes to human beings, I'm only interested in the sick...the ones who can stand up are nothing but mounds of vice and spite... I don't get mixed up in their schemes...

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

If only I had met Molly sooner, when it was still possible to choose one road rather than another. Before that bitch Muscle and that little turd Lola crimped my enthusiasm. But it was too late to start being young again. I didn't believe in it anymore. We grow old so quickly and, what's more, irremediably. You can tell by the way you start loving your misery in spite of yourself. Nature is stronger than we are, no two ways about it. She tries us in one particular mold, and we're never able to throw it off. I had started out as the restless type. Little by little, without realizing it, you begin to take your role and fate seriously, and before you know it, it's too late to change. You're a hundred-percent restless, and it's set that way for good.

— 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

I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

I have no ideas, myself! Not a one! There's nothing more vulgar, more common, more disgusting than ideas! Libraries are loaded with them! And every sidewalk café!...the impotent are bloated with ideas!...they dazzle youth with ideas! They play the pimp!...and youth is ever ready, as you know, Professor, to gobble up anything, to go OOH! And AAH! By the numbers! How those pimps have an easy job of it! The passionate years of youth are spent getting a hard on and gargling ideas!...philosophies, if you prefer!...yes sir, philosophies! Youth loves sham just as young dogs love those sticks, like bones, that we throw and they run after! They race forward, yipping away, wasting their time, that's the main thing!

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

In my room I'd barely closed my eyes when the blonde from the movie house came along and sang her whole song of sorrow just for me. I helped her put me to sleep, so to speak, and succeeded pretty well... I wasn't entirely alone... It's not possible to sleep alone...

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

It is of men, and of them only, that one should always be frightened.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline