Quotes from Journey to the End of the Night

“The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“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. ”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“There's no tyrant like a brain. ”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“There is 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 ever try to understand what we’re here for. They just don’t care. Americans or not, they sleep no matter what, they’re bloated mollusks, no sensibility, no trouble with their conscience.
I’d seen too many troubling things to be easy in my mind. I knew too much and not enough. I’d better go out, I said to myself, I’d better go out again. Maybe I’ll meet Robinson. Naturally that was an idiotic idea, but I dreamed it up as an excuse for going out again, because no matter how I tossed and turned on my narrow bed, I couldn’t snatch the tiniest scrap of sleep. Even masturbation, at times like that, provides neither comfort nor entertainment. Then you're really in despair.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“If you aren't rich you should always look useful.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“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, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“That is perhaps what we seek throughout life, that and nothing more, the greatest possible sorrow so as to become fully ourselves before dying.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“Lots of men are like that, their artistic leanings never go beyond a weakness for shapely thighs.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“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.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“The plain truth, I may as well admit it, is that I've never been really right in the head.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“When it becomes really impossible to get away and sleep, then the will to live evaporates of its own accord.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“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.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“Love is like liquor, the drunker and more impotent you are, the stronger and smarter you think yourself and the surer you are of your rights.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“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.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“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.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“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.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“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. The mechanical effort of conversation is nastier and more complicated than defecation. That corolla of bloated flesh, the mouth, which screws itself up to whistle, which sucks in breath, contorts itself, discharges all manner of viscous sounds across a fetid barrier of decaying teeth—how revolting! Yet that is what we are adjured to sublimate into an ideal. It's not easy. Since we are nothing but packages of tepid, half-rotted viscera, we shall always have trouble with sentiment. Being in love is nothing, its sticking together that's difficult. Feces on the other hand make no attempt to endure or grow. On this score we are far more unfortunate than shit; our frenzy to persist in ourpresent state—that's the unconscionable torture.
Unquestionably we worship nothing more divine than our smell. All our misery comes from wanting at all costs to go on being Tom, Dick, or Harry, year in year out. 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'd burst if we had the courage, day after day we come very close to it. The atomic torture we love so is locked up inside us by our pride.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“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.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“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.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“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.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“A God who counts minutes and pennies, a desperate sensual God, who grunts like a pig. A pig with golden wings, who falls and falls, always belly side up, ready for caresses, that’s him, our master. Come, kiss me.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavor, it’s indispensable.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“We've no use for intellectuals in this outfit. What we need is chimpanzees. Let me give you a word of advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. We will think for you, my friend. Don't forget it.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“We never change. Neither our socks nor our masters nor our opinions, or we're so slow about it that it's no use. We were born loyal and that's what killed us! Soldiers free of charge, heroes for everyone else, talking monkeys, tortured words, we are the minions of King Misery...It's not a life.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“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.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

“Love is the infinite placed within the reach of poodles. I have my dignity!”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quote from Journey to the End of the Night

About the author

Popular quotes

“One time Bonaventure heard the graphite of a pencil rasp across a piece of paper and leave a slight and quivered mark behind. He listened so hard he heard the graphite's history, when it was still a part of metamorphic rock that didn't know it would one day almost capture what was almost a thought from the mind of an insane man.”
― quote from The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow

“A person's eyes, they could tell you everything.”
― Suzanne Woods Fisher, quote from The Keeper

“If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”
― Steven Pressfield, quote from The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“Life is warped. I'm just in sync.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from MaddAddam

“I’m going to start from the beginning. All I ask is that you don’t interrupt and you silently pray Luke returns with a milkshake quickly, because they make me happy. And you want to keep me happy.” -Lily”
― J. Lynn, quote from Unchained

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.