Quotes from Erich Maria Remarque

What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!

Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.

It's all rot that they put in the war-news about the good humour of the troops, how they are arranging dances almost before they are out of the front-line. We don't act like that because we are in a good humour: we are in a good humour because otherwise we should go to pieces.

For a moment I had a strange intuition that just this, and in a real, profound sense, is life; and perhaps happiness even - love with a mixture of sadness, reverence, and silent knowledge.

Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me. -All Quiet On The Western Front, Chapter 12

You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.

I am a modern man with a strong tendency to self-destruction.

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.

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.

The things men did or felt they had to do.

Sweet dreams though the guns are booming.

I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness;--I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life...I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me.

I've not much interest in the important things of life. Only in the beautiful things. Just this lilac here makes me happy.

Katczinsky says it is all to do with education - it softens the brain.

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.

The best way to lose a woman was to show her a kind of life that one could offer her for only a few days.

Our thoughts are clay, they are moulded with the changes of the days;--when we are resting they are good; under fire, they are dead. Fields of craters within and without.

Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.

Some day perhaps our time will be known as the age of irony. Not the witty irony of the eighteenth century, but the stupid or malignant irony of a crude age of technological progress and cultural regression.

And even if these scenes from our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might be amongst them and move in them; we might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But 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 himself it is not.

It's not much. You begin by thinking there is something extraordinary about it. But you'll find out, when you've been out in the world a while longer, unhappiness is the commonest thing there is.

Love should not be polluted with friendship.

I felt the first soft glow of intoxication that makes the blood warmer and spreads an illusion of adventure over uncertainty.

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.