David Salinas

“When I see them here, in their rooms, in their offices, about their occupations, I feel an irresistible attraction in it, I would like to be here too and forget the war; but it repels me, it is so narrow, how can that fill a man’s life, he ought to smash it to bits; how can they do it, while out at the front the splinters are whining over the shell-holes and the star-shells go up, the wounded are carried back on waterproof sheets and comrades crouch in the trenches. – They are different men here, men I cannot properly understand, whom I envy and despise.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“This dead man is bound up with my life, therefore I must do everything, promise everything in order to save myself; I swear blindly that I mean to live only for his sake and his family, with wet lips I try to placate him--and deep down in me lies the hope that I may buy myself off in this way and perhaps even get out of this; it is a little stratagem: if only I am allowed to escape, then I will see to it. So I open the book and read slowly:--Gerard Duval, compositor.

With the dead man's pencil write the address on an envelope, then swiftly thrust everything back into his tunic.

I have killed the printer, Gerard Duval. I must be a printer, I think confusedly, be a printer, printer...”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“یکجور و یکنواخت کامیون ها تکان می خورند. یکجور و یکنواخت آن دو نفر داد می زنند و یکجور و یکنواخت باران می بارد. روی سر ما می بارد. روی سر مرده هایی که در میدان جنگ افتاده اند و روی بدن جوان موطلایی و زخم روبازش که برای بدن بچگانه او خیلی مهیب و کشنده است. روی قبر کمریش می بارد. و روی قلب ما.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“…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, All Quiet on the Western Front