Quotes About Loss

Wer bin ich, wenn ich bin, was ich habe und dann verliere, was ich habe?

If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?

We're no longer young men. We've lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We've been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don't believe in those things any more; we believe in the war.

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

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.

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

but that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.

No one could become stranger than the person you once loved

People should die, only when they're alone. Or when they hate—not when they love.

An hour passes. I sit tensely and watch his every movement in case he may perhaps say something. What if he were to open his mouth and cry out! But he only weeps, his head turned aside. He does not speak of his mother or his brothers and sisters. He says nothing; all that lies behind him; he is entirely alone now with his little life of nineteen years, and cries because it leaves him.

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts.

What has that to do with love?" "A great deal. It takes care of its continuance. Otherwise we would love once only and reject everything else later. But as it is, the remnant of desire for the man one leaves behind, or by whom one is left behind, becomes the halo around the head of the new one. To have lost someone before in itself gives the new one a certain romantic glamour. The hallowed old illusion.

Bertinck has a chest wound. After a while a fragment smashes away his chin, and the same fragment has sufficient force to tear open Leer's hip. Leer groans as he supports himself on his arm, he bleeds quickly, no one can help him. Like an emptying tube, after a couple of minutes he collapses. What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school.

Shells, gas clouds, and flotillas of tanks - shattering, corroding, death. Dysentery, influenza, typhus - scalding, choking, death.

Erich Maria Remarque

Albert expresses it: ''The war has ruined us for everything.'' He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing

Here lies our comrade, Kemmerich, who a little while ago was roasting horse flesh with us and squatting in the shell-holes. He it is still and yet it is not he any longer. His features have become uncertain and faint, like a photographic plate from which two pictures have been taken. Even his voice sounds like ashes.

Our life alternates between billets and the front. We have almost grown accustomed to it; war is the cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery. The deaths are merely more frequent, more varied and terrible.

We have yielded no more than a few hundred yards of it as a prize to the enemy. But on every yard there lies a dead man.

One lost easiest what one held in one's arms— never what one left.

What if he were to open his mouth and cry out! But he only weeps, his head turned aside. He does not speak of his mother of his brothers or his sisters. He says nothing; all that lies behind him; he is entirely alone now with his little life of nineteen years, and cries because it leaves him.

But I also knew that there was no going back. One can never go back; nothing and no one is ever the same. All that remained was an occasional evening of sadness, the sadness that we all feel because everything passes and because man is the only animal who knows it.

Albert expresses it: The war has ruined us for everything.

?ovek se hvata samo u svojim vlastitim snovima - a nikad u tu?im. ?ovek se hvata ili gubi.