Erich Maria Remarque Quotes

Most memorable quotes from Erich Maria Remarque.

Erich Maria Remarque Famous Quotes

Reading Erich Maria Remarque quotes, download and share images of famous quotes by Erich Maria Remarque. Righ click to see or save pictures of Erich Maria Remarque quotes that you can use as your wallpaper for free.

Below there are cyclists, lorries, men; it is a grey street and a grey subway; - it affects me as though it were my mother.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Below there are cyclists, lorries,
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
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: We lie under the network
Before my mother's tremulous anxiety I recover my composure. Now I can walk about and talk and answer questions without fear of having suddenly to lean against the wall because the world turns soft as rubber and my veins become brimstone.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Before my mother's tremulous anxiety
From this day forth I place
dressmakers above philosophers. Those people bring beauty
into life, and that's worth a hundred times the most unfathomable meditations.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: From this day forth I
People should die, only when they're alone. Or when they hate - not when they love.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: People should die, only when
Beside us lies a fair-headed recruit in utter terror. He has buried his face in his hands, his helmet has fallen off. I fish hold of it and try to put it back on his head. He looks up, pushes the helmet off and like a child creeps under my arm, his head close to my breast. The little shoulders heave. Shoulders just like Kemmerich's. I let him be.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Beside us lies a fair-headed
No one could become stranger than the person you once loved
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: No one could become stranger
When it is fairly quiet we can hear the transports behind the enemy lines rolling ceaselessly until dawn. Kat says that they do not go back but are bringing up troops - troops, munitions, and guns.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: When it is fairly quiet
He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: He fell in October 1918,
Going away is not always so simple - when one takes oneself along.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Going away is not always
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.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: The storm lashes us, out
Now we would wander around like strangers in those landscapes of our youth. We have been consumed in the fires of reality, we perceive differences only in the way tradesmen do, and we see necessities like butchers. We are free of care no longer – we are terrifying indifferent. We might be present in that world, but would we be alive in it?
We are like children who have been abandoned and we are as experienced as old men, we are coarse, unhappy and superficial – I think that we are lost
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Now we would wander around
From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us
mostly from the earth. 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 fro ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: From the earth, from the
The things here are stronger
the things that differentiate us from one another are too powerful. The common interest is no longer decisive. It has broken up already and given place to the interest of the individual. Now and then something still will shine through from that other time when we all wore the same rig, but already it is dwindled and dim. These others here are still our comrades and yet our comrades no longer
that is what is so sad. All else went west in the war, but comradeship we did believe in; now only to find that what death could not do, life is achieving; it is driving us asunder.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: The things here are stronger<br>the
And without love, one is a dead man on furlough, nothing but a scrap of paper with a few dates and a chance name on it, and we as well die.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: And without love, one is
Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Everyone saves someone at least
Anyway the war is over so far as they are concerned. But to wait for dysentery is not much of a life either.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Anyway the war is over
But that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: But that's what mankind is
This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: This book is to be
One often feels as though something had happened before, I remember. It comes quite close to you and stands there and you know it was just this way once before, exactly so; for an instant you almost know how it must go on, but then it disappears as you try to lay hold of it like smoke or a dead memory. "We could never remember, Isabelle," I say. "It's like the rain. That has also become one, out of two gasses, oxygen and hydrogen, which no longer remember they were once gasses. Now they are only rain and have no memory of an earlier time.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: One often feels as though
Suddenly a great sense of despondency comes over me. To-morrow we shall take the prepositions, I think to myself - and next week we shall have a dictation. In a year's time you will have by heart fifty questions from the Catechism; in four years you will start the larger multiplication tables. - And so you will grow up, and Time will take you in his pincers - one dumbly, another savagely, or gently or shatteringly. Each will have his own destiny and thus or thus it will overtake you. What help shall I be to you then with my conjugations and enumerations of all the rivers of Germany? Forty of you - forty different lives standing behind you and waiting. How gladly would I help you, if I could. But who can really help another here? Have I even been able to help Adolf Bethke? The bell rings. The first lesson is over.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Suddenly a great sense of
She was very beautiful and he felt he loved her. She was not beautiful as a state or a picture is beautiful; she was beautiful as a meadow across which the wind blows. It was life that pulsed in her and that had formed her into what she was.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: She was very beautiful and
Children, that's what a man needs - children, who know nothing about it.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Children, that's what a man
No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: No soldier outlives a thousand
A strange night, he thought. Somewhere now there is shooting and men are being hunted and imprisoned and tortured and murdered, some corner of a peaceful world is being trampled upon, and one knows it, helplessly, and life buzzes on in the bright bistros of the city, no one cares, and people go calmly to sleep, and I am sitting here with a woman between pale chrysanthemums and a bottle of calvados, and the shadow of love rises, trembling, lonesome, strange and sad, it too an exile from the safe gardens of the past, shy and wild and quick as if it had no right
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: A strange night, he thought.
…The silence spreads. I talk and must talk. So I speak to him and say to him: "Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you are only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth it appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are just poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying, and the same agony - Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother just like Kat and Albert. Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up - take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: …The silence spreads. I talk
We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death. We sit
on the edge of it crouching in danger, the grease drips from our hands, in our hearts we are close
to one another, and the hour is like the room: flecked over with the lights and shadows of our
feelings cast by a quiet fire. What does he know of me or I of him? formerly we should not have
had a single thought in common--now we sit with a goose between us and feel in unison, are so
intimate that we do not even speak.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: We are two men, two
We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.
- All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 5
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: We were eighteen and had
He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in war.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: He is right. We are
We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: We are not youth any
There was always a screen behind which one could hide - a superior who in turn had his superior - orders, instructions, duties, commands - and finally the many-headed monster, morale, necessity, hard reality, responsibility, or whatever it was called - there was always a screen behind which to evade the simple law of humanity.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: There was always a screen
Where is it, Rudolf?" she whispers, pressing herself against me. "Tell me where it is! Has a piece of me
been left behind everywhere? In all the mirrors I have looked into? I have seen lots of them, countless ones!
Am I scattered everywhere in them? Has each of them taken some part of me? A thin impression, a thin slice
of me? Have I been shaved down by mirrors like a piece of wood by a carpenter's plane? What is still left of
me?"
I take her by the shoulders. "All of you is still here," I say. "On-the contrary, mirrors add something. They
make it visible and give it to you - a bit of space, a lighted bit of our-self."
"Myself?" She continues to cling to my hand. "But suppose it is not that way? Suppose myself is buried all
over in thousands and thousands of mirrors? How can I get it back? Oh, I can never get it back! It is lost!
Lost! It has been rubbed away like a statue that no longer has a face. Where is my face? Where is my first
face? The one before all the mirrors? The one before they began to steal me!"
"No one has stolen you," I say in desperation. "Mirrors don't steal. They only reflect.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Where is it, Rudolf?
Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Strange how complicated we can
What has that to do with love?"
"A great deal. It takes care of its continuance. Otherwise we would love once only and reject everything else later. But as it is, the remnant of desire for the man one leaves behind, or by whom one is left behind, becomes the halo around the head of the new one. To have lost someone before in itself gives the new one a certain romantic glamour. The hallowed old illusion.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: What has that to do
It is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: It is too dangerous for
Here lies our comrade, Kemmerich, who a little while ago was roasting horse flesh with us and squatting in the shell-holes. He it is still and yet it is not he any longer. His features have become uncertain and faint, like a photographic plate from which two pictures have been taken. Even his voice sounds like ashes.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Here lies our comrade, Kemmerich,
up to the belly. When the attack starts I will let myself fall into the water, with my face as deep in the mud as I can keep it without suffocating. I must pretend to be dead. Suddenly
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: up to the belly. When
If we were not automata at that moment we would continue lying there, exhausted, and without will. But we are swept forward again, powerless, madly savage and raging; we will kill, for they are still our mortal enemies, their rifles and bombs are aimed against us, and if we don't destroy them, they will destroy us.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: If we were not automata
All that meets me, all that floods over me are but feelings - greed of life, love of home, yearning for the blood, intoxication of deliverance.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: All that meets me, all
The invisible storehouse in nothingness, called memory.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: The invisible storehouse in nothingness,
We didn't want the war, the others say the same thing - and yet half the world is in it all the same." "But there are more lies told by the other side than by us," say I; "just think of those pamphlets the prisoners have on them, where it says that we eat Belgian children. The fellows who write those lies ought to go out and hang themselves. They are real culprits.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: We didn't want the war,
Everything was floating and without weight. Future and past met and both were without desire or pain. No one thing was more important and stronger than anything else. The horizons were in equilibrium and for one strange moment the scales of his existence were even. Fate was never stronger than the serene courage with which one faced it. If one could no longer stand it, one could kill oneself. This was good to know, but it was also good to know that one was never completely lost so long as one was alive.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Everything was floating and without
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.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Keep things at arm's length
A hospital alone shows what war is.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: A hospital alone shows what
Thoughtfully I resume my patrolling to and fro between the benches. Now and again I catch a searching glance above the edge of a copy book. I stand still near the stove and look at the young faces. Most of them are good-natured and ordinary, some are sly, others stupid; but in a few there is a flicker of something brighter. For these life will not be so obvious and all things will not go so smoothly. Suddenly
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Thoughtfully I resume my patrolling
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.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: On the steps is a
I want to think and at the same time that's the last thing in the world I want to do.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: I want to think and
What is leave? – a pause that only makes everything after it so much worse.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: What is leave? – a
Extraordinary creatures you young people are, altogether. The past you hate, the present you despise, and the future is a matter of indifference. How do you suppose that can lead to any good end?
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Extraordinary creatures you young people
I cannot really play. Either at piano or at life; never, never have I been able to. I have always been too hasty, too impatient; something always intervenes and breaks it up. But who really knows how to play, and if he does know, what good is it to him? Is the great dark less dark for that, are the unanswerable questions less inscrutable, does the pain of despair at eternal inadequacy burn less fiercely, and can life ever be explained and seized and ridden like a tamed horse or is it always a mighty sail that carries us in the storm and, when we try to seize it, sweep us into the deep? Sometimes there is a hole in me that seems to extend to the center of the earth. What could fill it? Yearning? Dispair? Happiness? What happiness? Fatigue? Resignation? Death? What am I alive for? Yes, for what am I alive?
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: I cannot really play. Either
Here, on the borders of death, life follows an amazingly simply course, it is limited to what is most necessary, all else lies buried in gloomy sleep; - in that besides our primitiveness and our survival. Were we more subtly differentiated we must long since have gone mad, have deserted, or have fallen. As in a polar expedition, every expression of life must serve only the preservation of existence, and is absolutely focused on that. All else is banished because it would consume energies unnecessarily. That is the only way to save ourselves.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Here, on the borders of
The days, the weeks, the years out here shall come back again, and our dead comrades shall then stand up again and march with us, our heads shall be clear, we shall have a purpose, and so we shall march, our dead comrades beside us, the years at the Front behind us: - against whom, against whom?
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: The days, the weeks, the
A line, a short line, stumbles off into the morning. Thirty two men.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: A line, a short line,
Our heads were full of nebulous ideas, which cast an idealized, almost romantic glow over life
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Our heads were full of
He pointed to the sky in which Mars twinkled above the darkening roofs, large and red. "Yes, and they say that that fellow up there is closer to our earth than he has been for many years." He laughed. "Soon we'll read that somewhere a child has been born with a mole like a sword. And that it was raining blood somewhere else. The only thing missing now is the enigmatic comet of the Middle Ages to make all the ominous signs complete
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: He pointed to the sky
If you train a dog so that it only eats potatoes, and then after a while you offer it a chunk of meat, it'll still grab it because it's in its nature. And if you offer a man a bit of power, the same thing happens; he'll grab it. It's instinctive, because when it comes down to it, a man is basically a beast, and it's only later that a bit of decency gets smeared on top, the way you can spread dripping on your bread.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: If you train a dog
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.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: But probably that's the way
We get back pretty well. There is no further attack by the enemy. We lie for an hour panting and resting before anyone speaks. We are so completely played out that in spite of our great hunger we do not think of the provisions. Then gradually we become something like men again.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: We get back pretty well.
Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Someone said to me once
Ravic emptied his glass. He got a package of cigarettes out of his pocket, took one out and lit it. His hands were not yet steady. He flung the match on the floor and ordered another calvados. That face, that smiling face which he thought he had just seen again - he must have been
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Ravic emptied his glass. He
Nothing helps," she said, and smiled with an effort. "You forget it for a while - but you don't escape it.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Nothing helps,
The room shall speak, it must catch me up and hold me, I want to feel that I belong here, I want to hearken and know when I go back to the front line that the war will sink down, be drowned utterly in the great home-coming tide, know that it will then be past for ever, and not gnaw us continually, that it will have none but an outward power over us ... Nothing stirs; listless and wretched, like a condemned man, I sit there and the past withdraws itself. And at the same time I fear to importune it too much, because I do not know what might happen then. I am a soldier, I must cling to that.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: The room shall speak, it
The State, that immune betrayer, which embezzles billions and jails anyone who defrauds it of as much as five marks, would find some pretext for not paying.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: The State, that immune betrayer,
Mark this one thing my boy: never, never, never can a man make himself ridiculous in the eyes of a woman by anything he may do on her account. Not even by the most childish performances. Do anything you like, stand on your head, talk the most utter twaddle, swank like a peacock, sing under her window - anything at all but one thing: don't be matter of fact, don't be sensible.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Mark this one thing my
I, too, am going to go away soon,' she says, 'I am weary and weary of my weariness. Everything is beginning to be a little empty and full of leave-taking and melancholy and waiting.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: I, too, am going to
Actually, what does man live for?"
"To think about it. Any other question?"
"Yes. Why does he die just when he has done that and has become a bit more sensible?" "Some people die without having become more sensible."
"Don't evade my question. And don't start talking about the transmigration of souls."
"I'll ask you something else first. Lions kill antelopes; spiders flies; foxes chickens; which is the only race in the world that wars on itself uninterruptedly, fighting and killing one another?"
"Those are questions for children. The crown of creation, of course, the human being - who invented the words love, kindness, and mercy." "Good. And who is the only being in Nature that is capable of committing suicide and does it?" "Again the human being - who invented eternity, God, and resurrection."
"Excellent," Ravic said. "You see of how many contradictions we consist. And you want to know why we die?
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Actually, what does man live
out my cigarettes, break each one in half and give them to the Russians. They bow to me and then light the cigarettes. Now red points glow in every face. They comfort me; it looks as though there were little windows in dark village cottages saying that behind them are rooms full of peace. The
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: out my cigarettes, break each
How pointless all human thoughts, words and deeds must be, if things like this are possible! Everything must have been fraudulent and pointless if thousands of years of civilization weren't even able to prevent this river of blood, couldn't stop these torture chambers existing in their hundreds of thousands,
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: How pointless all human thoughts,
By day Lisbon has a naive theatrical quality that enchants and captivates, but by night it is a fairy-tale city, descending over lighted terraces to the sea, like a woman in festive garments going down to meet her dark lover.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: By day Lisbon has a
It's a primary law of this world that the old rule the young, that one must serve mine's time. It is no question of ability. Else what would become of the old dodderers who cling to power?
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: It's a primary law of
The music surged down the stairs like a flashing stream - it gathered in the corridor and burst like a waterfall through the wide entry doors. It splashed over a small, lonely figure crouching on the lowest step, dark and colorless like an un-moving lump of black, a little hillock with mad, unresting eyes. It was the old man who had freed himself with such difficulty from the unrelenting window. He crouched in the corner, lost and done for, with bowed shoulders and knees drawn high, as though he would never rise again - and over him, and away in gay and flashing cascades, the music splashed and danced, strong, pitiless, unceasing as life itself.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: The music surged down the
The facts of life are simple and trivial. Only our imagination gives life to them. It makes the laundry pole of facts a flagstaff of dreams.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: The facts of life are
An accordion player posted himself at the curb and played La Paloma. The rug peddlers appeared with silken Keshans over their shoulders. A boy sold pistachios at the tables. It looked as it had always looked - until the newspaper boys came. The papers were almost torn from their hands and a few seconds later the terrace, with all the unfolded papers, appeared as if buried under a swarm of huge, white, bloodless moths sitting on their victims greedily, with noiseless flapping wings.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: An accordion player posted himself
Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me.
-All Quiet On The Western Front, Chapter 12
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Let the months and years
And at night, waking out of a dream, overwhelmed and bewitched by the crowding apparitions, a man perceives with alarm how slight is the support, how thin the boundary that divides him from the darkness. We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out. Then the muffled roar of the battle becomes a ring that encircles us, we creep in upon ourselves, and with big eyes stare into the night.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: And at night, waking out
These memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow
a vast, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires
but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us. They are completely lost to us. They arise no more; we are dead and they stand remote on the horizon, they are a mysterious reflection, an apparition that haunts us, that we fear and love without hope. They are unattainable and we know it.
And even if these scenes of our youth were given back to us, we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in memory; but the man himself it is not.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: These memories of former times
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.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: The wisest were just the
I always thought everyone was against war until I found out there are those who are all for it, especially those who do not have to go there.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: I always thought everyone was
I had the feeling of slipping down a smooth bottomless pit. It had nothing to do with Breuer and the people. It had nothing to do with Pat even. It was the melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them; that love begins with a human being but does not end in him; and that everything can be there: a human being, love, happiness, life - and that yet in some terrible way it is always too little, and grows ever less the more it seems.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: I had the feeling of
Those are for us,' growls Detering. 'Don't talk rubbish,' Kat snaps back at him. 'You'll be lucky to get a coffin at all,' grins Tjaden, 'they'll just use a tarpaulin to wrap up that target-practice dummy you call a body, you wait and see.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Those are for us,' growls
I am thinking of those strange moments when unexpectedly a kind of second sight like a deceptive memory seems suddenly to give us glimpses of many earlier lives.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: I am thinking of those
Here where you stand, a young Etruscan woman stood in just the same way three thousand years ago - and the wind came in just this way from Africa and chased the light across the ocean.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Here where you stand, a
I stand there and wonder whether, when I am twenty, I shall have experienced the bewildering emotions of love.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: I stand there and wonder
It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: It's only terrible to have
I love him, his shoulders, his angular, stooping figure – and at the same time I see behind him woods and stars, and a clear voice utters words that bring me peace, to me, a soldier in big boots, belt, and a knapsack, taking the road that lies before him under the high heaven, quickly forgetting and seldom sorrowful, for ever pressing on under the wide night sky.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: I love him, his shoulders,
In any case, the bayonet isn't as important as it used to be. It's more usual now to go into the attack with hand-grenades and your entrenching tool. The sharpened spade is a lighter and more versatile weapon - not only can you get a man under the chin, but more to the point, you can strike a blow with a lot more force behind it. That's especially true if you can bring it down diagonally between the neck and the shoulder, because then you can split down as far as the chest. When you put a bayonet in, it can stick, and you have to give the other man a hefty kick in the guts to get it out.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: In any case, the bayonet
They talk too much for me. They have worries, aims, desires, that I cannot understand. I often sit with one of them in the little beer garden and try to explain to him that this is really the only thing: just to sit quietly, like this. They understand of course, they agree, they may even feel it so too, but only with words, only with words, yes, that is it--they feel it, but always with only half of themselves, the rest of their being is taken up with other things, they are so divided in themselves that none feels it with his whole; I cannot even say myself exactly what I mean.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: They talk too much for
That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting. The subject
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: That would be much simpler
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.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Little by little things began
Then we change our possy and lie down again to play cards. We know how to do that: to play cards, to swear, and to fight. Not much for twenty years;
and yet too much for twenty years.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Then we change our possy
In the afternoon, about three, he is dead. I
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: In the afternoon, about three,
I tell you this: it is the most despicable thing of all to drag animals into a war.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: I tell you this: it
With our young, awakened eyes, we saw that the classical conception of the fatherland held by our teachers resolved itself here into a renunciation of personality such as one would not ask of the meanest servants.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: With our young, awakened eyes,
We have so much to say, and we shall never say it.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: We have so much to
We came to realise - first with astonishment, then bitterness, and finally with indifference - that intellect apparently wasn't the most important thing ... not ideas, but the system; not freedom, but drill. We had joined up with enthusiasm and with good will; but they did everything to knock that out of us.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: We came to realise -
I'll tell you the story of the wave and the rock. It's an old story. Older than we are. Listen. Once upon a time there was a wave who loved a rock in the sea, let us say in the Bay of Capri. The wave foamed and swirled around the rock, she kissed him day and night, she embraced him with her white arms, she sighed and wept and besought him to come to her. She loved him and stormed about him and in that way slowly undermined him, and one day he yielded, completely undermined, and sank into her arms."
"And suddenly he was no longer a rock to be played with, to be loved, to be dreamed of. He was only a block of stone at the bottom of the sea, drowned in her. The wave felt disappointed and deceived and looked for another rock
"What does that mean? He should have remained a rock."
"The wave always says that. But things that move are stronger than immovable things. Water is stronger than rocks.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: I'll tell you the story
There she stands before me, and old woman with an anxious, care-worn face. Her hands are clasped - weary, toil-worn hands with a soft, wrinkled skin, where the veins stand out bluish; hands become so for my sake. - I never thought of that before. There is a lot I did not think of before; I was too young. But now I understand how it is that to this withered, little woman I am something different from any other soldier in the world: I am her child. To her I have always remained so, even as a soldier. In the war she has seen only a pack of wild beasts threatening the life of her child. It has never occurred to her that this same threatened child has been just such another wild beast to the children of yet other mothers. My
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: There she stands before me,
He drove the car back through the night to Paris. The hedges and orchards of Normandy flew past him. The moon hung oval and large in the misty sky. The ship was forgotten. Only the landscape remained. The landscape, the smell of hay and ripe apples, the silence and the deep peace of the inevitable
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: He drove the car back
Yes. Do you remember?"
Once more a shrug of the shoulders. "How should I remember? We have questioned thousands - "
"Questioned! Beaten into unconsciousness, kidneys crushed, bones broken, thrown into cellars like sacks, dragged up again, faces torn, testicles crushed - that was what you called questioning! The hot frightful moaning of those who were no longer able to cry - questioned! The whimpering between unconsciousness and consciousness, kicks in the belly, rubber clubs, whips - yes, all that you innocently called 'questioning'!"
"Don't move your hands! Or I'll shoot you down! Do you remember little Max Rosenberg who lay beside me in the cellar with his torn body and who tried to smash his head on the cement wall to keep from being questioned again - questioned, why? Because he was a democrat! And Willmann who passed blood and had no teeth and only one eye left after he had been questioned by you for two hours - questioned, why? Because he was a Catholic and did not believe your Fuehrer was the new Messiah. And Riesenfeld whose head and back looked like raw lumps of flesh and who implored us to bite open his arteries because he was toothless and no longer able to do it himself after he had been questioned by you - questioned, why? Because he was against war and did not believe that culture is most perfectly expressed by bombs and flame throwers. Questioned! Thousands have been questioned, yes - don't move your hands, you swine! And now finally I've got you
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Yes. Do you remember?Once" title="Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Yes. Do you remember?"
Once" width="913px" height="515px" loading="lazy"/>
Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.
Erich Maria Remarque Quotes: Nothing is the mirror in
Erich Ludendorff Quotes «
» Erich Neumann Quotes