Celine: [...] It was extreme poverty. Tougher than poverty, because in poverty you can let yourself go, degenerate, get drunk, but this was poverty which keeps up, dignified poverty. It was terrible. All my life I ate noodles. Because my mother used to repair old lacework. And one thing about old lace is that odors stick to it forever. And you can't deliver smelly lace! So what didn't smell? Noodles. I've eaten basinfuls My mother made noodles by the basinful. Boiled of noodles. noodles, oh, yes, yes, all my youth, noodles and mush. Stuff that didn't smell. The kitchen in the Passage Choiseul was on the second floor, as big as a cupboard, you got to the second floor by a corkscrew staircase, like this, and you had to go up and down endlessly to see if it was cooking, if it was boiling, if it wasn't boiling, impossible. My mother was a cripple, one of her legs didn't work, and she had to climb that staircase. We used to climb it twenty-five times a day. It was some life. An impossible life. And my father was a clerk. He came home at five. He had to do the deliveries for her. Oh, no, that was poverty, dignified poverty.

Celine: [...] My mother worshiped rich people, you see. So what do you expect, it colored me too. I wasn't quite convinced. No. But I didn't dare have an opinion, no, no. My mother who was in lace up to her neck would never have dreamed of wearing any. That was for the customers. Never. It wasn't done, you see. Not even the jeweler, he didn't wear jewels, the jeweler's wife never wore jewels. [...]

Celine: Oh, she couldn't, it wasn't within her reach. She'd have thought it all coarse, and then she didn't read books, she wasn't the kind of woman who reads. She didn't have any vanity at all. She kept on working till her death. I was in prison. I heard she had died. No, I was just arriving in Copenhagen when I heard of her death. A terrible trip, vile, yes— the perfect orchestration. Abominable. But things are only abominable from one side, don't forget, eh? And, you know ... experience is a dim lamp which only lights the one who bears it ... and incommunicable. . . . . Have to keep that for myself. For me, you only had the right to die when you had a good tale to tell. To enter in, you tell your story and pass on. That's what Death on the Installment Plan is, symbolically, the reward of life being death. Seeing as . . . it's not the good Lord who rules, it's the devil. Man. Nature's disgusting, just look at it, bird life, animal life.