Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“Maneviyat,beden sağlıklı olduğu sürece onun kibri ve zevkidir,ama hastalanır hastalanmaz ya da işler kötüye gittiğinde bu kez de derhal o bedenden kaçış kurtulma isteğidir.”

“Ce monde n' est je vous l'assure qu'une immense entreprise à se foutre du monde!”

“Gelecekten söz eden her kimse namussuzdur,tek geçerli olan güncel olandır.Kendi ölümsüzlüğüne değinmek,solucanlara söylev çekmeye benzer.”

“Living, just by itself - what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting - or he'll come along and nibble your brain.”

“Near the kiosk the old lady who sold refreshments seemed slowly to be gathering all the shadows of evening about her skirts.”

“Those people were pushing life and night and day in front of them. Life hides everything from people. Their own noise prevents them from hearing anything else. They couldn't care less. The bigger and taller the city, the less they care. Take it from me. I've tried. It's a waste of time.”

“We went there to grope for our happiness, which all the world was threatening with the utmost ferocity. We were ashamed of wanting what we wanted, but something had to be done about it all the same. Love is harder to give up than life. In this world we spend our time killing or adoring, or both together. "I hate you! I adore you!" We keep going, we fuel and refuel, we pass on our life to a biped of the next century, with frenzy, at any cost, as if it were the greatest of pleasures to perpetuate ourselves, as if, when all's said and done, it would make us immortal. One way or another, kissing is as indispensable as scratching. ”

“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 hurry, cream 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. I have to confess that I picked the sexy ones. No point in being proud; when it comes to miracles, take the ones that will stay with you.”

“Study changes a man, puts pride into him. You need it to get to the bottom of life. Without it you just skim the surface. You think you're in the know, but trifles throw you off. You dream too much. You content yourself with words instead of going deeper. That's not what you wanted. Intentions, appearances, no more. A man of character can't content himself with that. Medicine, even if I wasn't very gifted, had brought me a good deal closer to people, to animals, everything. Now all I had to do was plunge straight into the heart of things. Death is chasing you, you've got to hurry, and while you're looking you've got to eat, and keep away from wars. That's a lot of things to do. It's no picnic.”

“Düşünsenize, onların o kentleri ayakta duruyordu, dimdik ayakta. New York ayakta duran bir kenttir. Daha önce de çok kent görmüştük bizler elbette ve bayağı da güzel kentler ve limanlar, hem de en fiyakalısından. Ama bizim oralarda yan vaziyettedir kentler, değil mi, deniz kenarında ya da nehir kıyısında, manzaranın üzerine uzanıverirler, yolcuyu beklerler, oysa bu Amerikalısı, o öyle ayılıp bayılmıyordu, hayır, kazık gibi duruyordu, orada, hiç de sikici değildi, ürkütücü bir kazık.”

“...Hiçbir şey açıklanamaz. Dünyanın tek bildiği şey uyurken bir o yana bir bu yana dönen biri gibi sizi öldürmektir, dünya uyurken üstünüze abandığında, uyuyan birinin pireleri ezdiği gibi. Böylesine bir ölüm pek ahmakça olurdu, diye düşündüm, herkes gibi yani. İnsanlara güvenmek demek kendini azıcık öldürtmekle eşdeğerdir.”

“Garibanlar asla, ya da neredeyse hiç sormazlar, katlandıkları şeylerin nedenini niçinini. Birbirlerinden nefret etmekle yetinirler, o kadar”

“Her kentte böyle yerler vardır işte, o kadar sersemce çirkindirler ki, orada hemen her zaman yalnızsınızdır”

“They were conscientious, you couldn't deny it, and they were also flabby, heartless sons-of-bitches. In other words, they were well chosen, as mindlessly enthusiastic as any employer could dream of. Sons that would have delighted my mother, worshiping their bosses, if only she could have had one all to herself, a son she could have been proud of in the eyes of the world, a real legitimate son.”

“Вярно беше това, което ми бе обяснил, че във "Форд" взимат когото и да е. Не лъжеше. Отначало имах съмнения, защото сиромасите лесно започват да си въобразяват. От един момент нататък при мизерията умът не прекарва цялото си време с тялото. Прекалено зле му е вътре. Нещото, което ви говори тогава, е почти само душата. Не може да ѝ се търси отговорност на душата”

“If that's the case, hurrah for the crazy people! Look, Lola, do you remember a single name, for instance, of any of the soldiers killed in the Hundred Years War? Did you ever try to find out who any of them were? No! You see? You never tried. As far as you are concerned, they are as anonymous, as indifferent, as the last atom of that paperweight, as your morning bowel movement. Get into your head, Lola, that they died fot nothing! For absolutely nothing, the idiots! I say it and I'll say it again! I've proved it! The one thing that counts is life! In ten thousand years, I'll bet you, this war, remarkable as it may seem to us at present, will be utterly forgotten... Maybe here and there in the world a handful of scholars will argue about its causes or the dates of the principal hecatombs that made it famous. Up until now those are the only things about men that other men have thought worth remembering after a few centuries, a few years, or even a few hours... I don't believe in future, Lola...”

“My one and only chicken, bequeathed to me by Robinson, dreaded the noon hour the same as I did, he'd go back in with me. For three weeks the chicken lived with me like that, following me like a dog, clucking constantly, seeing snakes wherever he went. One day of extreme boredom, I ate him.”

“Lie, copulate, and die.”

“People cling to their rotten memories, to all their misfortunes, and you can't pry them loose. These things keep them busy. They avenge themselves for the injustice of the present by smearing the future inside them with this shit. They're cowards deep down, and just. That's their nature.”

“I've never been able to forget the infinite little smile of pure affection that danced across his livid face. Enough gaiety to fill the universe. Few people past twenty preserve any of the affection, the affection of animals. This world isn't what we expected. So our looks change! They change plenty! We made a mistake! And turned into a thorough stinker in next to no time! Past twenty it shows in our face! A mistake! Our face is just a mistake!”

“Laziness is almost as compelling as life. The new farce you're having to play crushes you with its banality, and all in all it takes more cowardice than courage to start all over again.”

“Cuando te detienes a observar, por ejemplo, el modo como se forman y profieren las palabras, no resisten nuestras frases al desastre de su baboso decorado. Es más complicado y más penoso que la defecación, nuestro esfuerzo mecánico de la conversación. Esa corola de carne abotargada, la boca que se agita silbando, aspira y se debate, lanza toda clase de sonidos viscosos a través de la hedionda barrera de la caries dental, ¡qué castigo! Y, sin embargo, eso es lo que nos exhortan a transponer en ideal. Es difícil. Puesto que no somos sino recintos de tripas tibias y a medio pudrir, siempre tendremos dificultades con el sentimiento. Enamorarse no es nada, permanecer juntos es lo difícil. La basura, en cambio, no pretende durar ni crecer. En ese sentido, somos mucho más desgraciados que la mierda, ese empeño de perseverar en nuestro estado constituye la increíble tortura.”

“Somos, por naturaleza, tan fútiles, que solo las distracciones pueden impedirnos de verdad morir.”

“When you write, you should put your skin on the table.”

“This body of ours, this disguise put on by common jumping molecules, is in constant revolt against the abominable farce of having to endure. Our molecules, the dears, want to get lost in the universe as fast as they can! It makes them miserable to be nothing but "us," the jerks of infinity.”

“We're even more dazed than usual. Here we sit, empty, bewildered, contented. We have nothing to talk about, because nothing happens to us anymore, we're too poor, maybe life is sick of us. Why not?”

“In the whole of your absurd past you discover so much that's absurd, so much deceit and credulity, that it might be a good idea to stop being young this minute, to wait for youth to break away from you and pass you by, to watch it going away, receding in the distance, to see all its vanity, run your hand through the empty space it has left behind, take a last look at it, and then start moving, make sure your youth has really gone, and then calmly, all by yourself, cross to the other side of Time to see what people and things really look like.”

“The mother sensed her daughter's animal superiority and instinctively condemned it out of hand, the unforgettable depth of her fucking, her way of coming like a continent!”

“My idealized account was so much to her liking that it brought us together. At that moment Lola seemed to discover that we had at least one taste in common, well concealed in my case, namely, a taste for social functions. She went so far as to kiss me in a burst of spontaneous emotion, something, I have to admit, that she seldom did. And then she was touched by the sadness of bygone fashions. Everyone has his own way of mourning the passage of time. It was through dead fashions that Lola perceived the flight of the years. "Ferdinand," she asked, "do you think there will be races here again?" "When the war is over, Lola, I should think..." "We can't be sure, can we?" "No, we can't be sure." The possibility that there would never again be races at Longchamp overwhelmed her. The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.”

“Wat het leven in feite zo dodelijk vermoeiend maakt is misschien wel de geweldige inspanning die we op moeten brengen om twintig, veertig jaar en nog wel langer redelijk te blijven, om niet gewoon volkomen jezelf te zijn, dat wil zeggen abject, wreed en absurd.”

“But maybe it's wrong of me to complain … I'm alive after all … and I lose an enemy or two every day … cancer, apoplexy, gluttony … it's a pleasure the number that pass on! … I'm not hard to please … a name! … another! … there are good things in life …”

“L'amour c'est l'infini mis à la portée des caniches et j'ai ma dignité moi !”

“The forest is only waiting for their signal to start trembling, hissing, and roaring from its depths. An enormous, love-maddened, unlighted railway station, full to bursting. Whole trees bristling with living noise makers, mutilated erections, horror.”

“I was a hundred-percent sick, I felt as if I had no further use for my legs, they just hung over the edge of my bed like unimportant and rather ridiculous objects.”

“The plain truth, I may as well admit it, is that I've never been really right in the head.”

“Why kid ourselves, people have nothing to say to one another, they all talk about their own troubles and nothing else. Each man for himself, the earth for us all. They try to unload their unhappiness on someone else when making love, they do their damnedest, but it doesn't work, they keep it all, and then they start all over again, trying to find a place for it. "Your pretty, Mademoiselle," they say. And life takes hold of them again until the next time, and then they try the same little gimmick. "You're very pretty, Mademoiselle..."And in between they boast that they've succeeded in getting rid of their unhappiness, but everyone knows it's not true and they've simply kept it all to themselves. Since at the little game you get uglier and more repulsive as you grow older, you can't hope to hide your unhappiness, your bankruptcy, any longer. In the end your features are marked with that hideous grimace that takes twenty, thrity years or more to climb form your belly to your face. That's all a man is good for, that and no more, a grimace that he takes a whole lifetime to compose. The grimace a man would need to express his true soul without losing any of it is so heavy and complicated that he doesn't always succeed in completing it.”

“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.”

“The mind is satisfied with phrased, but not the body, the body is more fastidious, it wants muscles. A body always tells the truth, that's why it's usually depressing and disgusting to look at.”

“She was having an attack of knuckleheaded anxiety. Those attacks last a long time.”

“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.”

“Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.”

“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.”

“There's something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don't give a damn whether they're getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don't even try to understand what we're here for. They just don't care.”

“You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It's frightening how many people and things there are in a man's past that have stopped moving. The living people we've lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all.As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.”

“Poor people never, or hardly ever, ask for an explanation of all they have to put up with. They hate one another, and content themselves with that.”

“La jeunesse vraie, la seule, c'est d'aimer tout le monde sans distinction, cela seulement est vrai, cela seulement est jeune et nouveau.”

“C'est peut-être ça qu'on cherche à travers les vie, rien que cela, le plus grand chagrin possible pour devenir soi-même avant de mourir.”

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

“Nearly all a poor bastard's desires are punishable by jail.”

“I tell you, little man, life's fall guys, beaten, fleeced to the bone, sweated from time immemorial, I warn you, that when the princes of this world start loving you, it means they're going to grind you up into battle sausage...”