Philosophical Pessimists

"Considering his position he became wonderfully free from the chronic melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with the decline of belief in a beneficent Power."

"By the time that Melbury reached the park, he was prepared to go any lengths in combating this rank and reckless errantry of his daughter's husband. He would fetch home Edgar Fitzpiers to-night by some means, rough or fair: in his view there could come of his interference nothing worse than what existed at present. And yet to every bad there is a worse."

"A novel is an impression, not an argument."

"'Twas a little one-eyed, blinking sort o' place."

"And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened; and little things a' didn't wish seen, anybody will see; and her wishes and ways will all be as nothing!"

"O memory, where is now my youth, Who used to say that life was truth?"

"Close under the eaves of the stack, and as yet barely visible, was the red tyrant that the women had come to serve—a timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels appertaining—the threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves."

"Good, but not religious-good."

"She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind — or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units."

"Those house them best who house for secrecy."

"A few days after the Normandy landings, knowing only too well that he would be either assassinated by résistants or condemned to death for treason by a new Gaullist or communist government, he fled France together with a thousand unrepentant French collaborators, one of whom was Marshal Pétain, the leader of the collaborationist Vichy government. With the help of Nazi occupiers, these fugitives absconded to the Sigmaringen Castle in the Swabian Alps of southern Germany. In March 1945, Céline and his wife, Lucette, then found refuge in Denmark, where they stayed until 1951, when Céline was assured he could return to France without fear for his life—although a French court had, in the meantime, condemned him in absentia as a "national disgrace." Having already served a spell in prison in Denmark at France’s behest, Céline was allowed to return home, settling in leafy Meudon, just outside Paris."

"[B]eing on the wrong side of history also served him a heaping plate of material for new work after 1945 when, in a trilogy of novels—D’un château l’autre (Castle to Castle, 1957), Nord (North, 1960), Rigodon (1961)—he chronicled a shattered world in ever more fragmented prose and honed his persecution complex via his increasingly deranged narrator. The writer who said he was only about style was in fact a revisionist historian, providing a rare and perversely instructive view of Vichy from the point of view of the defeated. His postwar novels are much more overtly political than the first two. They’re also ventures into Holocaust denial: "Nuremberg," he wrote in D’un château l’autre, "needs redoing.""

"To many Frenchmen, the Third Republic simply did not seem worth dying for, when so many of their fathers, brothers and friends had died for it already between 1914 and 1918. This was the mood - the refusal to pursue another Pyrrhic victory - that had been foreshadowed in Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), with its stomach-churning evocation of the slaughter of the last war's opening phase. The same mood inspired the Nobel laureate Roger Martin Du Gard's letter to a friend in September 1936: 'Anything rather than war! Anything . . . even Fascism in Spain . . . Even Fascism in France: Nothing, no trial, no servitude can be compared to war: Anything, Hitler rather than war!'"

"[T]here is no doubting where Céline stood on the central moral question of the age. In the struggle of democracy against totalitarianism, he was on the wrong side. Nor is there any doubt about what motivated Céline. He was possessed of a furious hatred. He wrote three pamphlets between 1937 and 1941 that supported Hitler and attacked the Jews. This was not the type of drawing-room antisemitism that you find in the work of, say, Evelyn Waugh. It was wild-eyed conspiracy theory, in which he saw the corrupting hand of Jews everywhere: in finance, industry, the media, education and much else. He lumped in, among others, Queen Elizabeth (mother of our current Queen), Wallis Simpson and Pope Pius XII as instruments of international Jewry."

""Louis-Ferdinand Céline," taken from his grandmother's and mother's first names, with his first novel. His second novel, Mort à crédit (Death on the Installment Plan, 1936), his greatest work, moves back in time to his childhood on the Passage Choiseul, a commercial arcade in central Paris where his mother ran a lace shop. The family lived upstairs, suffocating from the odors emanating from the gas lighting. You can read the novel as a lower-class rewrite of Proust. Céline’s madeleine scene is a family puking on a ferry; his Albertine is Nora at a British boarding school, Meanwell College, where the smitten Ferdinand, a younger version of the Ferdinand Bardamu we meet in Voyage, resolves not to talk. The writing, far cruder and more physical than that of the first novel, was censored, and the first edition was full of white spaces where words and phrases had been cut."

"Beating up Jews (by Jew I mean anyone with a Jew for a grandparent, even one!) won’t help, I’m sure, that’s just going around in circles, it’s a joke, you’re only beating around the bush if you don’t grab them by the strings [tefillins], if you don’t strangle them with them."

"[Industrialized man, drunk on alcohol and gasoline, becomes a confusion of sheep, bull and hyena.] Charming. The least obstructed little asshole looks on himself in the mirror as Jupiter.[18]"

"Since the end of the period of belief, leaders exalt every defect, every kind of sadism, and gain all the more through their vices: vanity, ambition, war, death in a word.[16]"

"The natives, by and large, had to be driven to work with clubs, they preserved that much dignity, whereas the whites, perfected by public education, worked of their own free will.[12]"

"Why struggle, waiting is good enough, since thievery is bound to end up in the street. Basically, only the street counts. Why deny it? It's waiting for us. One of these days we'll have to make up our minds and go down in to the street, not one or two or three of us, but all. We stand on the brink, we simper and fuss, but never mind, the time will come."

"Politics has putrified mankind more profoundly in the last three centuries than in the whole of pre-history. We were more united in the middle ages than we are today; then a common spirit took form.[16]"

"- (Lola): Only mad men and cowards refuse to go to the war, when their homeland is in danger! - (Bardamu): So, hurrah for the mad men and the cowards! ― [6]"

""The rich don't have to kill to eat." – [30]"

"In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavour, it's indispensable." ― [6]"

"The rich are inebriate in another way and cannot contrive to grasp these frenzied longings for security. To be rich is another form of intoxication: it spells forgetfulness. In fact, that is what one wants riches for: to forget."

"I warn you that when the princes of this world start loving you it means they are going to grind you up into battle sausage. ― [6]"

"I cannot refrain from doubting that there exist other genuine realizations of our deepest character than war and illness, those two infinities of nightmare.[39]"

"If you aren't rich you should always look useful."

"It's harder to lose the wish to love than the wish to live.[7]"

"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.[32]"

"Love is infinity - come down to poodles' level.[1]"

"And the music came back with the carnival, the music you've heard as far back as you can remember, ever since you were little, that's always playing somewhere, in some corner of the city, in little country towns, wherever poor people go and sit at the end of the week to figure out what's become of them, sometimes here, sometimes there, from season to season, it tinkles and grinds out the tunes that rich people danced to the year before. It's the mechanical music that floats down from the wooden horses, from the cars that aren't cars anymore, from the railways that aren't at all scenic, from the platform under the wrestler who hasn't any muscles and doesn't come from Marseille, from the beardless lady, the magician who's a butter-fingered jerk, the organ that's not made of gold, the shooting gallery with the empty eggs. It's the carnival made to delude the weekend crowd. We go in and drink the beer with no head on it. But under the cardboard trees the stink of the waiter's breath is real. And the change he gives you has several peculiar coins in it, so peculiar that you go on examining them for weeks and weeks and finally, with considerable difficulty, palm them off on some beggar. What do you expect at the carnival? Gotta have what fun you can between hunger and jail, and take things as they come. No sense complaining, we're sitting down aren't we? Which ain't to be sneezed at. I saw the same old Gallery of the Nations, the one Lola caught sight of years and years ago on that avenue in the park of Saint-Cloud. You always see things again at carnivals, they revive the joy of past carnivals. Over the years the crowds must have come back time and again to stroll on the main avenue of the park of Saint-Cloud...taking it easy. The war had been over long ago. And say I wonder if that shooting gallery still belonged to the same owner? Had he come back alive from the war? I take an interest in everything. Those are the same targets, but in addition, they're shooting at airplanes now. Novelty. Progress. Fashion. The wedding was still there, the soldier too, and the town hall with its flag. Plus a few more things to shoot at than before.[27]"

"Everything interesting takes place in the dark; there is no doubt about it. We know nothing of the true story of the men. ― [6]"

"Almost every desire a poor man has is a punishable offence.[16]"

"The one who talks about the future is a rascal. The present is the only thing that matters. To invoke one’s posterity is to make a speech to maggots. [4]"

"We are, by nature, so futile that distraction alone can prevent us from dying altogether.[17]"

"I believed in her body, I didn't believe in her soul. I thought of Lola as a charming goldbrick, miles away from the war, miles away from life."

"The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time."

"I don't think about anything," he says, "No thoughts at all! I think about not getting killed... that keeps me busy... One more day is one more day-That's what I think!"

"Then I fell sick, I was delirious, driven mad by fear, they said at the hospital. Maybe so. The best thing to do when you're in this world, don't you agree, is to get out of it. Crazy or not, scared or not."

"The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so."

"{Music symbolizes the loss of faith, of common belief.] The small, intimate church is closed, the organs are dead, it is sadder than before. Only those whom fate designs for the eternal mass of infinite love remain. They compose only a very small chapel of clarity in space and time.[45]"

"The one thing any of us really cared about was living for one more hour, one more hour is a big deal in a world where everything has reduced itself to murder."

"A woman who spends her time worrying about pregnancy is a virtual cripple; she'll never go very far.― [7]"

"Hate gave birth to the slang; Slang (‘argot’) exists not anymore."

"I clearly see you a tapeworm, but not a cobra, not a cobra at all...no good at the flute! (…) I’ll go applaud you when you finally become a true monster, when you’ll have paid them, the witches, what you have to, their price, so they transmute you, blossom you, into a true phenomenon. Into a tapeworm that plays the flute. (To the Fidgeting Lunatic)"

"God is being repaired."

"You can be a virgin in horror the same as in sex."

"I should be able to get the alligators to dance to the tune of the pan pipe."

"I should give all the works of Baudelaire for a female Olympic swimmer."