Journey To The End Of The Night Quotes
"Nothing has changed. They go on admiring themselves, that’s all. And that’s not new either."
"The French race can do with some defending, seeing it doesn’t exist."
"We never change. Neither our socks nor our masters nor our opinions, or we’re so slow about it that it’s no use."
"Love is the infinite placed within the reach of poodles. I have my dignity!"
"Could I, I thought, be the last coward on earth? How terrifying! … All alone with two million stark raving heroic madmen."
"The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in."
"In short, my morale was low. If I’d told Lola what I thought of the war, she’d have taken me for a monster and banished me from the ultimate joys of her boudoir."
"You don’t lose much when the landlord’s house burns down."
"I thought of Lola as a charming goldbrick, miles away from the war, miles away from life."
"I wasn’t very bright myself, but at least I had sense enough to opt for cowardice once and for all."
"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."
"If you’ve got plenty of nerve, you’re all set, because then you’re entitled to do practically anything at all, you’ve got the majority on your side, and it’s the majority who decide what’s crazy and what isn’t."
"Even so my diagnosis was very doubtful. So the authorities decided to put me under observation for a while."
"Everything that’s important goes on in the darkness, no doubt about it. We never know anyone’s real inside story."
"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!'"
"One way or another, kissing is as indispensable as scratching."
"We never knew exactly what they were thinking. Under their affable smiles as they walked among us, they carried our death sentences."
"The question of life and death escapes him completely. Even on the subject of his own death his cogitations are feeble and ass-backward."
"I hadn’t found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor."
"A person sound in body and soul should take everything that happens as entertainment, neither more nor less, and we are wholesome young women, beautiful, respected, healthy, and well bred."
"All those angelic creatures had a plan all worked out in their perineum, like a convict, a little plan for love later on, when all of us soldier boys should have perished in God knows what mud and God knows how!"
"I never heard from Lola, or from Musyne either. Those sluts were on the good side of the situation, from which we, the flesh earmarked for sacrifice, were barred by smiling but implacable orders."
"Our psychological conceptions are in need of total revision!"
"What I couldn’t help hearing under their spoken words and expressions of sympathy was this: 'Nice little soldier boy, you’re going to die … You’re going to die … This is war … Everyone has his own life … his role … his death …'"
"The petty cares of business were everything to Madame Puta; in this she resembled Madame Herote, but with a difference; in her case, they possessed her body and soul, just as God possesses his nuns."
"Monsieur Puta got so many orders that he sometimes had trouble filling them."
"Take a man and woman with otherwise equal qualities, you always seem to find a little more uneasiness in a man, however stagnant and narrow-minded."
"The plain truth, I may as well admit it, is that I’ve never been really right in the head."
"So as I warmed myself in the pantry with the servants, I was unaware that the people dancing over my head were Argentine gods, they could have been German, French, or Chinese, that didn’t mean a thing, the point was that they were gods, rich people, that’s what I should have realized."
"In the midst of the general delirium, this Princhard took a certain liking to me, though he distrusted me of course."
"The old man saw four husky militiamen coming toward him. At first he didn’t understand what they wanted with him, but then he began to roll his eyes, which were bloodshot like the eyes of a terrified old animal that has never been beaten before."
"Lieutenant Grappa relit his cigar. In my presence, he affected an air of aloofness from these things."
"If they only knew how completely cold their bickerings leave me, they’d stay in their jungle where they belong instead of chewing my ear off with their cock and bull stories!"
"That’s the way it goes. You can’t deny it, men have a hard time doing all that’s demanded of them: butterflies in their youth, maggots at the end."
"Lieutenant Grappa was too cautious a man to provoke a scandal in Topo while he was in command, but he was definitely pissed off, maybe he was jealous."
"Every ray of light was torture. A big mangy mole."
"The hunt in these parts didn’t yield much, and at least one grandmother a week was eaten for want of gazelles."
"You see these niggers all around us? … Well, when I came to Little Togo almost thirty years ago, those loafers still lived by hunting, fishing, and intertribal massacres!"
"The story was that he’d thought up a beautiful scheme that would make him a fortune in two years … But he’d never have time to carry it out."
"After trying in vain for several days, I managed to have a few talks with her in private. Her periods, she confided, lasted no less than three weeks. Fault of the tropics."
"This military-commercial complex is much more modern and hypocritical; it is, indeed, the basis of our own system."
"Lieutenant Grappa was no great shakes at geography."
"Utterly naive, frankly cannibalistic, maddened by poverty, and ravaged by a thousand plagues."
"Familiar and all in all agreeable as the place had become to me, the time came when I had to think of leaving Topo."
"The only furnishings in his hut were his folding bed, mine, and a few crates, some empty, some full."
"There ought to be some mark by which to distinguish good people from bad."
"I’ll long remember those ten days going up the river."
"The forest is only waiting for their signal to start trembling, hissing, and roaring from its depths."
"There’s nothing like it! What a lift it gives you!"
"What a discovery! What an America! What ecstasy!"
"The food on board struck me as quite acceptable."
"I had to look at the practical side of things and not dip into my small supply of money right away."
"The life of people without resources is nothing but one long rebuff and one long frenzy of desire."
"The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies."
"I was sick of being alone. I was sick of dreams. I wanted sympathy! Human contact!"
"Life hides everything from people. Their own noise prevents them from hearing anything else."
"When, grown older, we look back on the selfishness of the people who’ve been mixed up with our lives, we see it undeniably for what it was, as hard as steel or platinum and a lot more durable than time itself."
"Life is keeping body and soul together."
"A city without concierges has no history, no savor, it’s as insipid as a soup without pepper and salt, nondescript slop."
"Courage doesn’t consist in forgiveness, we always forgive too much."
"Where there’s a luxurious body there’s always a possibility of rape, of a direct, violent breaking and entering into the heart of wealth and luxury, with no fear of having to return the loot."
"Travel is the search for this nothing, this bit of intoxication for numbskulls."
"Beauty is like drink or comfort, once you get used to it, you stop paying attention."
"Maybe that’s what we look for all our lives, the worst possible grief, to make us truly ourselves before we die."
"Getting back from the Other World isn’t the half of it. You pick up the sticky, precarious thread of your days just as you left it dangling. It’s waiting for you."
"Intentions, appearances, no more. A man of character can’t content himself with that."
"People avenge themselves for the favors done them."
"The fact is that when you’re at war you say peace will be better, you bite into that hope as if it were a chocolate bar, but it’s only shit after all."
"Too much humiliation, too much misery culminate in total inertia."
"It doesn’t take much to please you once you’re thoroughly resigned."
"The world is too much for you to bear. You give up."
"Medicine is a thankless profession. When you get paid by the rich, you feel like a flunky, by the poor like a thief."
"You never mind very much when an adult passes on. If nothing else, you say to yourself, it’s one less stinker on earth, but with a child you can never be so sure."
"Every family in the house had spent the day in dressing gowns and shirt sleeves, lending a helping hand, well reinforced by highly seasoned food."
"The fishermen on the bank weren’t catching anything. They didn’t even seem to care very much whether they caught any fish or not. The fish must have known them. They were all just pretending."
"A body always tells the truth, that’s why it’s usually depressing and disgusting to look at."
"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."
"It’s no use trying, we slide, we skid, we fall back into the alcohol that preserves the living and the dead, we get nowhere. It’s been proved."
"It's like a parade … Like having a movie show in my bean …"
"We’re not even capable of thinking death through."
"All things considered, the best time is the few weeks while you’re still unknown in a new place."
"Life is like that. It’s waiting for us. One of these days we’ll have to make up our minds and go down into the street, not one or two or three of us, but all."
"Being in love is nothing, it’s sticking together that’s difficult."
"You can’t know what it is to come back and wait for something if you haven’t seen all the coming back and waiting poor people expecting a pension can do."
"All things that stink are indoors, they preen themselves, but they stink all the same."
"We can only get together in silence, when it’s too late, like the dead."
"Misery is like some horrible woman you’ve married. Maybe it’s better to end up loving her a little than to knock yourself out beating her all your life."
"There’s never enough time, it’s true, not even for thinking of yourself."
"Whole clouds full of angels, including some very far-out and disreputable ones, all over the place."
"Serious for all time, bent over her tea, she doesn’t look at anything else."
"Fear of the end has marked all that with its wrinkles, while we were chasing around town in search of pleasure or bread."
"The only real youth, Mr. Priest, is loving everyone without distinction, that alone is true, that alone is young and new."
"The world never gets into his head, and that’s the way he wants it."
"Happiness in short. Still, I had to think about going back to work. Time was passing, and so were the Abbé Protiste’s bonus and my savings."
"There are simple lunatics and there are others, tortured by an obsession with civilization."
"Between the penis and mathematics, Monsieur Baryton, there’s nothing! A vacuum!"
"Death had come between us and so had life."
"You need a heart and a certain amount of knowledge to go further than other people."
"We’re nothing now but an old lamppost with memories on a street where hardly anyone passes anymore."
"You’re good and sick of hearing yourself talk … you abridge … You give up."