Erich Maria Remarque Quotes
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All Quiet on the Western Front.
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No soldier outlives a thousand chances.
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Katczinsky says it is all to do with education - it softens the brain.
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We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.
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We march up, moody or good-tempered soldiers - we reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals.
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Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.
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Heaven Has No Favorites.
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The storm lashes us, out of the confusion of grey and yellow the hail of splinters whips forth the childlike cries of the wounded, and in the night shattered life groans painfully into silence. Our hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of rain. We do not know whether we are still alive.
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We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither know nor can determine where it will fall." - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 6
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But probably that's the way of the world - when we have finally learned something we're too old to apply it - and so it goes, wave after wave, generation after generation. No one learns anything at all from anyone else.
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On the steps is a machine-gun ready for action. The square is empty; only the streets that lead into it are jammed with people. It would be madness to go farther - the machine-gun is covering the square.
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We want to live at any price; so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings which, though they might be ornamental enough in peace-time, would be out of place here.
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We have so much to say, and we shall never say it.
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Kat and Kropp get in an argument over the war as they rest from an hour’s worth of drill (occasioned by Tjaden’s not saluting a major properly). Kat believes the war would be over if leaders gave all the participants “the same grub and the same pay,” as he says in a rhyme. Kropp believes the leaders of each country should fight each other in an arena to settle the war; the “wrong” people currently do the fighting.
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The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas those who were better off, and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be, were beside themselves with joy.
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I did not want to think so much about her. I wanted to take her as an unexpected, delightful gift, that had come and would go again — nothing more. I meant not to give room to the thought that it could ever be more. I knew too well that all love has the desire for eternity and that therein lies its eternal torment. Nothing lasts. Nothing.
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... but that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.
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Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.
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(Ravic speaking of a butterfly caught in the Louvre) In the morning it would search for flowers and life and the light honey of blossoms and would not find them and later it would fall asleep on millennial marble, weakened by then, until the grip of the delicate, tenacious feet loosened and it fell, a thin leaf of premature autumn.
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To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and again and often forever.
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My rage outweighs my shame, as always happens when one is really ashamed and knows he ought to be.
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Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!
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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.
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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.