Mikhael

“Do you feel afraid a lot?' he said. 'For no good reason you can think of?”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I think I've loved you since I met you,' he says as we draw apart. 'I just mistook it for curiosity.”
― Alice Oseman, Solitaire

“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. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age . . . throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing; - it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“And even if these scenes of our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do . . . 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 the memory; but the man itself it is not.

We could never regain the old intimacy with those scenes.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front