48
" The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. 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. "
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline
49
" 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. "
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline , Journey to the End of the Night
59
" And anything that the boys could carry, they made off with. Combs, lamps, silly little things, even bridal wreaths, everything went. As if we'd had years of life ahead of us. They looted to take their minds off their troubles, to make it look as if they had years before them. Everybody likes that feeling.
As far as they were concerned, gunfire was nothing but noise. That's why wars can keep going. Even the people who make them, who fight in them, don't really get the picture. Even with a bullet in their gut, they'd go on picking up old shoes that 'might come in handy.' The way a sheep, lying on its side in a meadow, will keep on grazing with its dying breath. Most people don't die until the last moment; others start twenty years in advance, sometimes more. Those are the unfortunates. "
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline , Journey to the End of the Night