Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Louis-Ferdinand Céline) was the pen name of Dr. Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches, a French novelist, pamphleteer and physician. The name Céline was the first name of his grandmother. He developed a new style of writing that modernized French literature...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth27 May 1894
CountryFrance
taken thinking medicine
Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren't so many of them left. Think it over... no more syphilis, no more clap, no more typhoid... antibiotics have taken half the tragedy out of medicine.
men feelings inspire
This instinctive repulsion which tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the very rare consolations for being so impoverished which are given to those of us who don’t sell anything to anybody.
humble self people
There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism.
way our-words disaster
When you stop to examine the way in which our words are formed and uttered, our sentences are hard-put to it to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins.
philosophy philosophical believe
To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe.
dream art distance
The foreground in a picture is always unattractive... Art demands that the interest of the canvas should be placed in the far distance, where lies take refuge, those dreams which blossom out of fact and are man's only love.
All in all, death is something like marriage.
life life-is transparency
Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it's the transparency that counts.
way cowardly being-afraid
Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.
people long special
When you stay too long in the same place, things and people go to pot on you, they rot and start stinking for your special benefit.
people evil pay
The rich don't have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don't do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody's happy.
light wells knows
Well, you know... experience is a muffled lantern that throws light only on the bearer...it's incommunicable...
night scare chin-up
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.
war heart race
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.