Erich Maria Remarque Quotes
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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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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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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 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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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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Heaven Has No Favorites.
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Katczinsky says it is all to do with education - it softens the brain.
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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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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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All Quiet on the Western Front.
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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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-Why does a man live? -In order to think about it.
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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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No soldier outlives a thousand chances.
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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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We have so much to say, and we shall never say it.
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Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.
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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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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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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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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 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.