David Salinas

“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 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, 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

“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, All Quiet on the Western Front