Joseph Hoff

“It’s easy to speak of betrayal. But to betray somebody you need an opportunity, and once you have it you’ve got to take it. It’s like opening a window in jail. Everybody would like to, but you don’t often get the chance.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“We are so trivial by nature that only amusements can stop us from dying for real. I clung to the movies with desperate fervor.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“The rich don’t have to kill to eat. They “employ” people, as they call it. The rich don’t do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody’s happy. They have beautiful women, the poor have ugly ones. Clothing aside, they’re the product of centuries. Easy to look at, well fed, well washed. After all these years, life can boast no greater accomplishment. 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. After all these centuries of watching our domestic animals coming into the world, laboring and dying before our eyes without anything more unusual ever happening to them either than taking up the same insipid fiasco where so many other animals had left off, we should have caught on. Endless waves of useless beings keep rising from deep down in the ages to die in front of our noses, and yet here we stay, hoping for something …”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“Little by little I’d broken my bad habit of promising my patients good health. The prospect of getting well didn’t thrill them. Good health can’t be anything but second best. Getting well means you can work. Isn’t that lovely?”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night