Louis-Ferdinand Céline
French Novelist
| Date of Birth | : | 27 May, 1894 |
| Date of Death | : | 01 Jul, 1961 |
| Place of Birth | : | Courbevoie, France |
| Profession | : | Novelist, Physician, Pamphleteer |
| Nationality | : | French |
Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches, was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale."
Quotes
Total 21 Quotes
All in all, death is something like marriage.
The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in, and to die without realizing how far people can go in the way of crumminess. When the grave lies open before us, let's not try to be witty, but record the worst of human viciousness we've seen without changing one word. When that's done, we can curl up our toes and sink into the pit. That's work enough for a lifetime.
To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose.
The more one is hated, I find, the happier one is.
There's no tyrant like a brain.
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.
The plain truth, I may as well admit it, is that I've never been really right in the head.
An unfamiliar city is a fine thing. That's the time and place when you can suppose that all the people you meet are nice. It's dream time.
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.
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.
