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.
