Erich Maria Remarque > Quotes

“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.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“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 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?”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum. ”
― Erich Maria Remarque

“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, All Quiet on the Western Front

“It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“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, All Quiet on the Western Front

“We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“I did not want to think so much about her. I wanted to take her as an unexpected, delightful gift, that had come and would go again — nothing more. I meant not to give room to the thought that it could ever be more. I knew too well that all love has the desire for eternity and that therein lies its eternal torment. Nothing lasts. Nothing.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Night in Lisbon

“We have so much to say, and we shall never say it.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“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, Three Comrades

“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, All Quiet on the Western Front

“How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“You may turn into an archangel, a fool, or a criminal—no one will see it. But when a button is missing—everyone sees that.”
― Erich Maria Remarque

“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.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“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…we creep in upon ourselves and with big eyes stare into the night…and thus we wait for morning.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“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, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Why do they never tell us that you are 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?”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“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.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“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.”
― Remarque, Erich Maria Remarque, Erich Maria, All Quiet on the Western Front

“-Why does a man live?
-In order to think about it...”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“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

“Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Sometimes I used to think that one day i should wake up, and all that had been would be over. forgotten, sunk, drowned. Nothing was sure - not even memory.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“Ни один человек не может стать более чужим, чем тот, которого ты в прошлом любил...”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades