Adem > Adem's Quotes

“Remember, Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. I will be hoping that this letter finds you, and finds you well.”
― The Shawshank Redemption

“I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.”
― James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

“It's a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.”
― James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

“I was in his hands, he called me by the thunder at my ear. I was in his hands: I was being changed; all that I could do was cling to him. I did not realize, until I realized it, that I was also kissing him, that everything was breaking and changing and turning in me and moving toward him.”
― James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

“Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today— when it meant so little.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Night in Lisbon

“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, Three Comrades

“I don’t want to get old.”
“You won’t get old. Life will pass over your face, that will be all, and it will become more beautiful. One is old only when one no longer feels.”
“No. When one no longer loves.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“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, The Black Obelisk

“I am a modern man with a strong tendency to self-destruction.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Black Obelisk

“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, The Black Obelisk

“I've not much interest in the important things of life. Only in the beautiful things. Just this lilac here makes me happy.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“I felt the first soft glow of intoxication that makes the blood warmer and spreads an illusion of adventure over uncertainty.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“Regret is the most useless thing in the world. One cannot recall anything. And one cannot rectify anything. Otherwise we would all be saints. Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“The coffin, it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“Am I jealous? he thought, astonished. Jealous of the chance object to which she has attached herself? Jealous of something that does not concern me? One can be jealous of a love that has turned away, but not of that to which it has turned.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“Human beings are a much worse poison than schnapps or tobacco".”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“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, Three Comrades

“What is leave? – a pause that only makes everything after it so much worse.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Night is nature's protest against the leprosy of civilization, Gottfried. No decent man can withstand it for long. He begins to notice that he has been turned out of the silent company of the trees, the animals, the stars, and unconscious life.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Black Obelisk

“We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Haven't you ever observed how we live in an age of self-persecution? What a lot of things there are one might do that one doesn't - and yet why, God only knows. Work has become so tremendously important to-day, because so many have none, I suppose, that it kills everything else... Work, work, work . . . an abominable obsession - and always under the illusion it will be different later. And it never is different. Queer, isn't it, that anyone should do that with his life?”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“... We had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“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, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“The morning of that day, as Gabriel rose and started out to work, the sky was low and nearly black and the air too thick to breath. Late in the afternoon the wind rose, the skies opened, and the rain came. The rain came down as though once more in Heaven the Lord had been persuaded of the good uses of a flood. It drove before it the bowed wanderer, clapped children into houses, licked with fearful anger against the high, strong wall, and the wall of the lean-to, and the wall of the cabin, beat against the bark and the leaves of trees, trampled the broad grass, and broke the neck of the flower. The world turned dark, forever, everywhere, and windows ran as though their glass panes bore all the tears of eternity, threatening at every instant to shatter inward against this force, uncontrollable, so abruptly visited on the earth.”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

“Nothing tamed or broke her, nothing touched her, neither kindness, nor scorn, nor hatred, nor love. She had never thought of prayer. It was unimaginable that she would ever bend her knees and come crawling along a dusty floor to anybody’s altar, weeping for forgiveness. Perhaps her sin was so extreme that it could not be forgiven; perhaps her pride was so great that she did not need forgiveness. She had fallen from that high estate which God had intended for men and women, and she made her fall glorious because it was so complete.”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

“His mind was like the sea itself: troubled, and too deep for the bravest man's descent, throwing up now and again, for the naked eye to wonder at, treasure and debris long forgotten on the bottom—bones and jewels, fantastic shells, jelly that had once been flesh, pearls that had once been eyes. And he was at the mercy of this sea, hanging there with darkness all around him.”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain