It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.
Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.
The music enchanted the air. It was like the south wind, like a warm night, like swelling sails beneath the stars, completely and utterly unreal... It made everything spacious and colourful, the dark stream of life seemed pulsing in it; there were no burdens any more, no limits; there existed only glory and melody and love, so that one simply could not realize that, at the same time as this music was, outside there ruled poverty and torment and despair.
We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth.
It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.
I did not want to think so much about her. I wanted to take her as an unexpected, delightful gift, that had come and would go again — nothing more. I meant not to give room to the thought that it could ever be more. I knew too well that all love has the desire for eternity and that therein lies its eternal torment. Nothing lasts. Nothing.
We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.
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.
We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.
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.
You may turn into an archangel, a fool, or a criminal—no one will see it. But when a button is missing—everyone sees that.
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.
This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.
Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!
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.
A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world.
That is the remarkable thing about drinking: it brings people together so quickly, but between night and morning it sets an interval again of years.
To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.
Sometimes I used to think that one day i should wake up, and all that had been would be over. forgotten, sunk, drowned. Nothing was sure - not even memory.
-Why does a man live? -In order to think about it...
Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.
Courage is the fairest adornment of youth.
It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.
Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.
We have so much to say, and we shall never say it.
I want to think and at the same time that's the last thing in the world I want to do.
Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It's one of the most important secrets of living.
With blinded eyes I stared at the sky, this grey, endless sky of a crazy god, who had made life and death for his amusement.
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.
No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.
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.
Katczinsky says it is all to do with education - it softens the brain.
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.
Our knowledge of life is limited to death
Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today— when it meant so little.
Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.
Sweet dreams though the guns are booming.
Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.
The things men did or felt they had to do.
You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.
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.
Anything you can settle with money is cheap.
For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress -- to the future.
I felt the first soft glow of intoxication that makes the blood warmer and spreads an illusion of adventure over uncertainty.
The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.
It's no shame to be born stupid. Only to die stupid.
I, too, am going to go away soon,' she says, 'I am weary and weary of my weariness. Everything is beginning to be a little empty and full of leave-taking and melancholy and waiting.
I am a modern man with a strong tendency to self-destruction.
... but that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.
It is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them.
The coffin, it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it
Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.
Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.
We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.
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
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've not much interest in the important things of life. Only in the beautiful things. Just this lilac here makes me happy.
What is leave? – a pause that only makes everything after it so much worse.
What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!
Life is a disease, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.
No soldier outlives a thousand chances.
The train goes slowly. From time to time it stops, so that the dead can be taken off. It stops a lot.
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.
Extraordinary creatures you young people are, altogether. The past you hate, the present you despise, and the future is a matter of indifference. How do you suppose that can lead to any good end?
Then when I am sad and understand nothing anymore, I say to myself that it's better to die while you still want to live, than to die and want to die.
We have lost all sense of other considerations, because they are artificial. Only the facts are real and important to us. And good boots are hard to come by." - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 2
Through the years our business has been killing;-it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of lif eis limited to death.
No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.
Suddenly he knew all the things he should have said.
Ligh doesn't shine in the light; it shines in the dark.
The more primitive a man is the better he believes himself to be.
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.
We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad.
... We had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.
Human beings are a much worse poison than schnapps or tobacco".
One always expects something else.
What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school?
Today the aggressor is the shepherd of peace, and the beaten and hunted are the troublemakers of the world. What's more, there are whole races who believe it!
I don’t know what it is. I simply can’t stand it. It’s like a hand reaching out of the dark. It is fear—blind fear as if it were lying in wait somewhere for me.
Our damnable memory is a sieve. It wants to survive. And survival is only possible through forgetfulness.
I always thought everyone was against war until I found out there are those who are all for it, especially those who do not have to go there.
I stand there and wonder whether, when I am twenty, I shall have experienced the bewildering emotions of love.
Serenity, the calm daughter of tolerance
We agree that it's the same for everyone; not only for us here, but everywhere, for everyone who is of our age; to some more, and to others less. It is the common fate of our generation.
State and home country, there’s a difference
The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.
I tell you this: it is the most despicable thing of all to drag animals into a war.
Give 'em all the same grub and all the same pay and the war would be over and done in a day.
My rage outweighs my shame, as always happens when one is really ashamed and knows he ought to be.
There was too little solid ground under one's feet.
He begins to notice that he has been turned out of the silent company of the trees, the animals, the stars, and the unconscious life.
I am thinking of those strange moments when unexpectedly a kind of second sight like a deceptive memory seems suddenly to give us glimpses of many earlier lives.
