To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!
Interpretation
The quote expresses a desire to embrace the freedom and passion of music over the constraints of reality and rationality.
In this quote, Louis-Ferdinand Celine conveys a profound longing for the liberating power of music, rejecting the limitations imposed by reality and reason. He suggests that the emotional intensity and exhilaration found in music offer a more fulfilling existence than a life constrained by logical reasoning or prose, implying that society often undervalues the raw emotion and passion that art can evoke.
In practice
During an art exhibition, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of emotional expression in art.
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.
To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength.
In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavor, it’s indispensable.
Truth is a pain which will not stop. And the truth of this world is to die. You must choose: either dying or lying. Personally, I have never been able to kill myself
Reason died in 1914, November 1914 ... after that everybody began to rave.
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.
The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.
Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.
Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
I don't need to manufacture trauma in my life to be creative. I have a big enough reservoir of sadness or emotional trauma to last me.
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
The stuff I'm passionate about is what I write; it isn't multi-million-dollar franchise movies.
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