From Journey To The End Of The Night by Ferdinand Celine.
“A man must be very degraded to regret one year more then another!…Was yesterday such a bargain? Or last year? What did you think of it? Regret what I ask you! Youth? You and I never had any youth!
The poor, it’s true, get younger inside as they go along, and attempt to jettison all the lies and fear and contemptible eagerness to obey they were given at birth, they’re less revolting than at the start. The rest of what exists on earth isn’t for them! It doesn’t concern them. Their job, their only job, is to get rid of their obedience, to vomit it up. If they manage that before kicking in, then they can boast that they haven’t lived for nothing.
The only real youth is loving everyone without distinction, that alone is true, that alone is young and new. Well, do you know many young people who are like that? I don’t! All I see is crusty old stupidities fermenting in more or less recent bodies, and the more these sordid absurdities ferment the more they stimulate the young and the more they boast how fantastically young they are! But it’s not true, it’s bullshit. They’re young the way a boil is young, no more, because of the pus inside that hurts and makes them swell up.”
