Erich Maria Remarque

we have so much to say, and we shall never say it.

Our knowledge of life is limited to death

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

The coffin, it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it

Am I jealous? he thought, astonished. Jealous of the chance object to which she has attached herself? Jealous of something that does not concern me? One can be jealous of a love that has turned away, but not of that to which it has turned.

No soldier outlives a thousand chances.

At school nobody ever taught us how to light a cigarette in a storm of rain, nor how a fire could be made with wet wood-nor that it is best to stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn't get jammed, as it does in the ribs.

Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.

Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.

Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.

It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.

I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was.

The days, the weeks, the years out here shall come back again, and our dead comrades shall then stand up again and march with us, our heads shall be clear, we shall have a purpose, and so we shall march, our dead comrades beside us, the years at the Front behind us:—against whom, against whom?

No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.

Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.

Keep things at arm's length... If you let anything come too near you want to hold on to it. And there is nothing a man can hold on to.

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

Give 'em all the same grub and all the same pay/And the war would be over and done in a day." - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 3

They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.