Erich Maria Remarque Quotes
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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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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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Katczinsky says it is all to do with education - it softens the brain.
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Sweet dreams though the guns are booming.
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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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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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Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!
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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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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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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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-Why does a man live? -In order to think about it.
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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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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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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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What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!
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Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.
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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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My rage outweighs my shame, as always happens when one is really ashamed and knows he ought to be.
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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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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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We have so much to say, and we shall never say it.
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No soldier outlives a thousand chances.
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Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.