by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
““How many lives would I need to make myself an idea more powerful than anything in the world? ... My ideas went rattling around in my head with lots of space between them. They were like faint, flickering little candles, trembling throughout a lifetime in the middle of a ghostly, abominable universe. Maybe things were a little better than twenty years ago, nobody could say that I hadn’t made a beginning of progress, but there seemed no possibility of my ever managing, like Robinson, to fill my head with one single idea, but that one superb, a thought far stronger than death, and of my succeeding, just with my idea, of exuding joy, carefreeness, and courage wherever I went...”
“How many lives would I need to make myself an idea more powerful than anything in the world? ... My ideas went rattling around in my head with lots of space between them. They were like faint, flickering little candles, trembling throughout a lifetime in the middle of a ghostly, abominable universe. Maybe things were a little better than twenty years ago, nobody could say that I hadn’t made a beginning of progress, but there seemed no possibility of my ever managing, like Robinson, to fill my head with one single idea, but that one superb, a thought far stronger than death, and of my succeeding, just with my idea, of exuding joy, carefreeness, and courage wherever I went...”
““The Aztecs, so the story goes, routinely disembowelled eight thousand faithful a week in their temples of the sun, a sacrifice to the god of the clouds to make him send them rain. Such things are hard to believe until you get mixed up in a war. Once you're in a war, you see how it is: the Aztecs' contempt for other people's bodies was the same as my humble viscera must have inspired in our above mentioned General Celadon des Entrayes, who, thanks to a series of promotions, had become a kind of chickenshit god, an abominably exigent little sun.”
“The Aztecs, so the story goes, routinely disembowelled eight thousand faithful a week in their temples of the sun, a sacrifice to the god of the clouds to make him send them rain. Such things are hard to believe until you get mixed up in a war. Once you're in a war, you see how it is: the Aztecs' contempt for other people's bodies was the same as my humble viscera must have inspired in our above mentioned General Celadon des Entrayes, who, thanks to a series of promotions, had become a kind of chickenshit god, an abominably exigent little sun.”
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