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For a moment I had a strange intuition that just this, and in a real, profound sense, is life; and perhaps happiness even - love with a mixture of sadness, reverence, and silent knowledge.
Erich Maria Remarque -
Little by little things began to assume a new aspect. The sense of insecurity vanished, words came of themselves, I was no longer so painfully conscious of everything I said. I drank on and felt the great soft wave approach and embrace me; the dark hour began to fill with pictures and stealthily the noiseless procession of dreams appeared again superimposed on the dreary, grey landscape of existence.
Erich Maria Remarque
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A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world.
Erich Maria Remarque -
What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!
Erich Maria Remarque -
Keep things at arm's length... If you let anything come too near you want to hold on to it. And there is nothing a man can hold on to.
Erich Maria Remarque -
To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.
Erich Maria Remarque -
Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.
Erich Maria Remarque -
I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.
Erich Maria Remarque
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Our knowledge of life is limited to death.
Erich Maria Remarque -
That is the remarkable thing about drinking: it brings people together so quickly, but between night and morning it sets an interval again of years.
Erich Maria Remarque -
The coffin, it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it.
Erich Maria Remarque