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