Erich Maria Remarque Quotes
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-Why does a man live? -In order to think about it.
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Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.
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We have so much to say, and we shall never say it.
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What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!
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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.
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I am often on guard over the Russians. In the darkness one sees their forms move like stick storks, like great birds. They come close up to the wire fence and lean their faces against it. Their fingers hook round the mesh.
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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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My rage outweighs my shame, as always happens when one is really ashamed and knows he ought to be.
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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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The music enchanted the air. It was like the south wind, like a warm night, like swelling sails beneath the stars, completely and utterly unreal... It made everything spacious and colourful, the dark stream of life seemed pulsing in it; there were no burdens any more, no limits; there existed only glory and melody and love, so that one simply could not realize that, at the same time as this music was, outside there ruled poverty and torment and despair.
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A hospital alone shows what war is.
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All Quiet on the Western Front.
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Heaven Has No Favorites.
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The crowd, still shouting, gives way before us. We plough our way through. Women hold their aprons over their faces and go stumbling away. A roar of fury goes up. A wounded man is being carried off.
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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.
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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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I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was.
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Give 'em all the same grub and all the same pay/And the war would be over and done in a day." - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 3
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Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.
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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 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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I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel the same powerful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books. The breath of desire that then arose from the coloured backs of the books, shall fill me again, melt the heavy, dead lump of lead that lies somewhere in me and waken again the impatience of the future, the quick joy in the world of thought, it shall bring back again the lost eagerness of my youth. I sit and wait.
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Sweet dreams though the guns are booming.
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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.