Elise’s Reviews > All Quiet on the Western Front > Status Update

“We will kill, for they are still our mortal enemies, their rifles and bombs are aimed at us, and if we don’t destroy them, they will destroy us.”

“We were 18 and had begun to love life in 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.”

“To no man does the Earth mean so much as to the soldier…when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shellfire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever.”

“Kropp proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever sur-vives, his country wins. That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.”

“Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk.”