Maria Remarque Quotes & Sayings

I am often on guard over the Russians. In the darkness one sees their forms move like stick storks, like great birds. They come close up to the wire fence and lean their faces against it. Their fingers hook round the mesh. — Erich Maria Remarque

Help when you can; do everything then - but when you can no longer do anything, forget it! Turn away! Pull yourself together. Compassion is meant for quiet times. Not when life is at stake. Bury the dead and devour life! You'll still need it. Mourning is one thing, facts are another. One doesn't mourn less when one sees the facts and accepts them. That is how one survives. — Erich Maria Remarque

Habit is the explanation of why we seem to forget things so quickly. Yesterday we were under fire, to-day we act the fool and go foraging through the countryside, to-morrow we go up to the trenches again. We forget nothing really. But so long as we have to stay here in the field, the front-line days, when they are past, sink down in us like a stone; they are too grievous for us to be able to reflect on them at once. If we did that, we should have been destroyed long ago. I soon found out this much: - terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks; - but it kills, if a man thinks about it. Just — Erich Maria Remarque

There had never been any more between us than
chance had brought. But perhaps that makes a greater indebtedness
and binds closer than much else — Erich Maria Remarque

Things become quieter, but the cries do not cease. "What's up, Albert?" I ask. "A couple of columns over there got it in the neck." The cries continued. It is not men, they could not cry so terribly. "Wounded horses," says Kat. It's unendurable. It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning. — Erich Maria Remarque

From this day forth I place
dressmakers above philosophers. Those people bring beauty
into life, and that's worth a hundred times the most unfathomable meditations. — Erich Maria Remarque

The facts of life are simple and trivial. Only our imagination gives life to them. It makes the laundry pole of facts a flagstaff of dreams. — Erich Maria Remarque

Kropp, on the other hand, is more philosophical. He reckons that all declarations of war ought to be made into a kind of festival, with entrance tickets and music, like they have at bullfights. Then the ministers and generals of the two countries would have to come into the ring, wearing boxing shorts, and armed with rubber truncheons, and have a go at each other. Whoever is left on his feet, his country is declared the winner. That would be simpler and fairer than things are out here, where the wrong people are fighting each other. — Erich Maria Remarque

Night is nature's protest against the leprosy of civilization, Gottfried. No decent man can withstand it for long. He begins to notice that he has been turned out of the silent company of the trees, the animals, the stars, and unconscious life. — Erich Maria Remarque

It is the second night," he said. "The dangerous night. The charm of the unknown is gone and the charm of familiarity has not yet come. We'll survive it. — Erich Maria Remarque

I see their dark forms, their beards move in the wind. I know nothing of them except that they are prisoners; and that is exactly what troubles me. Their life is obscure and guiltless;--if I could know more of them, what their names are, how they live, what they are waiting for, what are their burdens, then my emotion would have an object and might become sympathy. But as it is I perceive behind them only the suffering of the creature, the awful melancholy of life and the pitilessness of men. — Erich Maria Remarque

What's going on outside, Ravic?" "Nothing new, Kate. The world goes on eagerly preparing for suicide and at the same time deluding itself about what it's doing." "Will there be war?" "Everyone knows that there will be war. What one does not yet know is when. Everyone expects a miracle." Ravic smiled. "Never before have I seen so many politicians who believe in miracles as at present in France and England. And never so few as in Germany." She remained lying silent for a while. "To think that it should be possible - " she said then. "Yes - it seems so impossible that it will happen some day. Just because one considers it so impossible and doesn't protect oneself against it. — Erich Maria Remarque

We have so much to say, and we shall never say it. — Erich Maria Remarque

By day Lisbon has a naive theatrical quality that enchants and captivates, but by night it is a fairy-tale city, descending over lighted terraces to the sea, like a woman in festive garments going down to meet her dark lover. — Erich Maria Remarque

To be alone - the eternal refrain of life. It wasn't better or worse than anything else. One talked too much about it. One was always and never alone. A violin, suddenly - somewhere out of a twilight - in a garden on the hills around Budapest. The heavy scent of chestnuts. The wind. And dreams crouched on one's shoulders like young owls, their eyes becoming lighter in the dusk. A night that never became night. The hour when all women were beautiful. — Erich Maria Remarque

Don't ask about the consequences if you want to do something. Otherwise you'll never do it. — Erich Maria Remarque

My rage outweighs my shame, as always happens when one is really ashamed and knows he ought to be. — Erich Maria Remarque

Clothes sometimes gave one more of a lift than any philosophic comforting. — Erich Maria Remarque

She was very beautiful and he felt he loved her. She was not beautiful as a state or a picture is beautiful; she was beautiful as a meadow across which the wind blows. It was life that pulsed in her and that had formed her into what she was. — Erich Maria Remarque

Only the stupid conquer in life; the other man foresees
too many obstacles and becomes uncertain before he starts. — Erich Maria Remarque

The more primitive a man is the better he believes himself to be. — Erich Maria Remarque

The things here are stronger
the things that differentiate us from one another are too powerful. The common interest is no longer decisive. It has broken up already and given place to the interest of the individual. Now and then something still will shine through from that other time when we all wore the same rig, but already it is dwindled and dim. These others here are still our comrades and yet our comrades no longer
that is what is so sad. All else went west in the war, but comradeship we did believe in; now only to find that what death could not do, life is achieving; it is driving us asunder. — Erich Maria Remarque

The mist was like a faint perfume. — Erich Maria Remarque

that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but drill. We became soldiers with eagerness and enthusiasm, but they have done everything to knock that out of us. After three weeks it was no longer incomprehensible to us that a braided postman should have more authority over us than had formerly our parents, our teachers, and the whole — Erich Maria Remarque

It brings a lump into the throat to see how they go over, and run and fall. A man would like to spank them, they are so stupid, and to take them by the arm and lead them away from here where they have no business to be. They wear grey coats and trousers and boots, but for most of them the uniform is far too big, it hangs on their limbs, their shoulders are too narrow, their bodies too slight; no uniform was ever made to these childish measurements. — Erich Maria Remarque

Heaven Has No Favorites — Erich Maria Remarque

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

To a woman flattery is not flattery.It is a compliment, which unfortunately in these miserable days has become all to rare. A woman is not a piece of steel furniture; she is a flower - she does not ask for reality; she wants the warm, gay sun of flattery.It is better to say something pretty to her every day, than to slave grimly for her all your life. — Erich Maria Remarque

I have been running all about; I have knocked again at all the doors of my youth and desired to enter in there; I thought, surely it must admit me again, for I am still young and have wished so much to forget; but it fled always before me like a will-o'-the-wisp; it fell away without a sound; it crumbled like tinder at my lightest touch. And I could not understand.
Surely here at least something of it must remain? I attempted it again and again, and as a result made myself merely ridiculous and wretched. But now I know. I know now that a still, silent war has ravaged this country of my memories also; I know now it would be useless for me to look farther. Time lies between like a great gulf; I cannot get back. There is nothing for it; I must go forward, march onward, anywhere; it matters nothing, for I have no goal — Erich Maria Remarque

A bitch. No prostitute. A bitch. If you were a Russian you would understand. — Erich Maria Remarque

There behind me on the stretchers my comrades are now lying and still they call. It is peace, yet they must die. But I, I am trembling with joy and am not ashamed. - And that is odd. Because none can ever wholly feel what another suffers - is that the reason why wars perpetually recur? 2 — Erich Maria Remarque

A miracle is never perfect when it happens, there are always little disappointments. But once it's gone for good and nothing can change it, memory could make it perfect and then it would never change. If I can just call it to life now, won't it always stay the same? Won't it stay with me as long as I live? — Erich Maria Remarque

On the steps is a machine-gun ready for action. The square is empty; only the streets that lead into it are jammed with people. It would be madness to go farther - the machine-gun is covering the square. — Erich Maria Remarque

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. — Erich Maria Remarque

So I thought. Are you happy?"
"What's that?"
"Don't you know yet? But who really knows what it is? Dancing on the head of a pin, maybe. — Erich Maria Remarque

The later it gets the more disturbed the city becomes. I go with Albert through the streets. Men are standing in groups at every corner. Rumours are flying. It is said that the military have already fired on a procession of demonstrating workers. — Erich Maria Remarque

She had no country, Ravic thought. But she did not need one either. She was at home on all ships. She was at home wherever there was courage and conflict and even defeat if it was without despair. She was not only the goddess of victory, she was also the goddess of all adventurers and the goddess of refugees - so long as they did not give up. — Erich Maria Remarque

We are little flames, inadequately sheltered by thin walls from the tempest of dissolution and insensibility in which we flicker and often are all but extinguished. — Erich Maria Remarque

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. — Erich Maria Remarque

Here, on the borders of death, life follows an amazingly simply course, it is limited to what is most necessary, all else lies buried in gloomy sleep; - in that besides our primitiveness and our survival. Were we more subtly differentiated we must long since have gone mad, have deserted, or have fallen. As in a polar expedition, every expression of life must serve only the preservation of existence, and is absolutely focused on that. All else is banished because it would consume energies unnecessarily. That is the only way to save ourselves. — Erich Maria Remarque

(Ravic speaking of a butterfly caught in the Louvre) In the morning it would search for flowers and life and the light honey of blossoms and would not find them and later it would fall asleep on millennial marble, weakened by then, until the grip of the delicate, tenacious feet loosened and it fell, a thin leaf of premature autumn. — Erich Maria Remarque

Do you know how one knows a cavalier when one sees him? He always behaves decently when he is drunk. — Erich Maria Remarque

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. — Erich Maria Remarque

How shabby the truth can become when one articulates it. — Erich Maria Remarque

Everything must have been fraudulent and pointless if thousands of years of civilization weren't even able to prevent this river of blood, couldn't stop these torture chambers existing in their hundreds of thousands. Only a military hospital can really show you what war is. — Erich Maria Remarque

Sweet dreams though the guns are booming. — Erich Maria Remarque

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? — Erich Maria Remarque

I felt today when the night melted away into a flowering bush and the wind smelled of strawberries and without love one is only a dead man on furlough, nothing but a scrap of paper with a few dates and a chance name on it and one might as well die — Erich Maria Remarque

It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men. — Erich Maria Remarque

Suddenly he knew all the things he should have said. — Erich Maria Remarque

Cans. We don't have to think anymore. Everything is premeditated, pre-chewed, pre-felt. Cans. All you have to do is open them. Delivered to your home three times a day. Nothing any more to cultivate yourself, or let grow and boil on the fire of questions, of doubt, and of desire. Cans. — Erich Maria Remarque

Everything was all right. That which had been and that which was still to come. It was enough. If it were the end, it was all right so. He had loved somebody and lost her. He had hated another and killed him. Both had freed him. One had brought his feelings to life again; the other had eradicated his past. Nothing remained behind unfulfilled. No desire was left; no hatred, nor any lament. If this were a new beginning, then that was what it was. One would start without expectation, prepared for many things, with the simple strength of experience which had strengthened and not torn asunder. The ashes had been cleared away. Paralyzed places were alive again. Cynicism had turned into strength. It was all right. — Erich Maria Remarque

Educationalists who think they can understand the young are enthusiasts. Youth does not want to be understood; it wants only to be let alone. It preserves itself immune against the insidious bacillus of being understood. The grown-up who would approach it too importunately is as ridiculous in its eyes as if he had put on children's clothes. We may feel with our youth, but youth does not feel with us. That is its salvation. — Erich Maria Remarque

Those are for us,' growls Detering. 'Don't talk rubbish,' Kat snaps back at him. 'You'll be lucky to get a coffin at all,' grins Tjaden, 'they'll just use a tarpaulin to wrap up that target-practice dummy you call a body, you wait and see. — Erich Maria Remarque

A strange night, he thought. Somewhere now there is shooting and men are being hunted and imprisoned and tortured and murdered, some corner of a peaceful world is being trampled upon, and one knows it, helplessly, and life buzzes on in the bright bistros of the city, no one cares, and people go calmly to sleep, and I am sitting here with a woman between pale chrysanthemums and a bottle of calvados, and the shadow of love rises, trembling, lonesome, strange and sad, it too an exile from the safe gardens of the past, shy and wild and quick as if it had no right — Erich Maria Remarque

THE LONG WALK is a raw, wrenching, blood-soaked chronicle of the human cost of war. Brian Castner, the leader of a military bomb disposal team, recounts his deployment to Iraq with unflinching candor, and in the process exposes crucial truths not only about this particular conflict, but also about war throughout history. Castner's memoir brings to mind Erich Maria Remarque's masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front. — Jon Krakauer

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. — Erich Maria Remarque

See what has become of us. As far as I know, only the old Greeks had gods of drinking and the joy of life: Bacchus and Dionysus. Instead of that we have Freud, inferiority complexes and the psychoanalysis. We're afraid of the too great words in love and not afraid of much too great words in politics. A sorry generation! — Erich Maria Remarque

Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It's one of the most important secrets of living. — Erich Maria Remarque

Beside us lies a fair-headed recruit in utter terror. He has buried his face in his hands, his helmet has fallen off. I fish hold of it and try to put it back on his head. He looks up, pushes the helmet off and like a child creeps under my arm, his head close to my breast. The little shoulders heave. Shoulders just like Kemmerich's. I let him be. — Erich Maria Remarque

Haie looked round once again and said wrathfully, satisfied and rather mysteriously: Revenge is black-pudding. — Erich Maria Remarque

A man is courageous
only when he is also afraid. — Erich Maria Remarque

Suddenly a great sense of despondency comes over me. To-morrow we shall take the prepositions, I think to myself - and next week we shall have a dictation. In a year's time you will have by heart fifty questions from the Catechism; in four years you will start the larger multiplication tables. - And so you will grow up, and Time will take you in his pincers - one dumbly, another savagely, or gently or shatteringly. Each will have his own destiny and thus or thus it will overtake you. What help shall I be to you then with my conjugations and enumerations of all the rivers of Germany? Forty of you - forty different lives standing behind you and waiting. How gladly would I help you, if I could. But who can really help another here? Have I even been able to help Adolf Bethke? The bell rings. The first lesson is over. — Erich Maria Remarque

I soon found out this much:
terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks;
but it kills, if a man thinks about it. — Erich Maria Remarque

A woman who is desired by someone else, even a love-starved coffinmaker, immediately becomes more precious than before. Man, as it happens, lives by relative rather than absolute values. — Erich Maria Remarque

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. — Erich Maria Remarque

We stand and gaze. The farmhouse, the remnants of the wood, the heights, the trenches on the sky yonder, - it had been a terrible world and life a burden. Now it is over and will stay behind here; when we set out, it will drop behind us, step by step, and in an hour be gone as if it had never been. - Who can realize it? — Erich Maria Remarque

We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through. — Erich Maria Remarque

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 — Erich Maria Remarque

The train goes slowly. From time to time it stops, so that the dead can be taken off. It stops a lot. — Erich Maria Remarque

He looked around. The room, a few suitcases, some belongings, a handful of well-read books - a man needed few things to live. And it was good not to get used to many things when life was unsettled. Again and again one had to abandon them or they were taken away. One should be ready to leave every day. That was the reason he had lived alone - when one was on the move one should not have anything that could bind one. Nothing that could stir the heart. The adventure - but nothing more. — Erich Maria Remarque

Shells, gas clouds, and flotillas of tanks - shattering, corroding, death. Dysentery, influenza, typhus - scalding, choking, death. Trenches, hospitals, the common grave - there are no other possibilities. — Erich Maria Remarque

Perhaps there is really nothing else when everything is falling to pieces, I think, except this bit of togetherness and even that is a sweet deception, for when someone else really needs you you cannot follow him or stand by him. I have noticed that often enough in the war when I looked into the face of a dead comrade. Each one of us has his own death and must suffer it alone; no one can help him then. — Erich Maria Remarque

The room shall speak, it must catch me up and hold me, I want to feel that I belong here, I want to hearken and know when I go back to the front line that the war will sink down, be drowned utterly in the great home-coming tide, know that it will then be past for ever, and not gnaw us continually, that it will have none but an outward power over us ... Nothing stirs; listless and wretched, like a condemned man, I sit there and the past withdraws itself. And at the same time I fear to importune it too much, because I do not know what might happen then. I am a soldier, I must cling to that. — Erich Maria Remarque

And without love, one is a dead man on furlough, nothing but a scrap of paper with a few dates and a chance name on it, and we as well die. — Erich Maria Remarque

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 — Erich Maria Remarque

I cannot really play. Either at piano or at life; never, never have I been able to. I have always been too hasty, too impatient; something always intervenes and breaks it up. But who really knows how to play, and if he does know, what good is it to him? Is the great dark less dark for that, are the unanswerable questions less inscrutable, does the pain of despair at eternal inadequacy burn less fiercely, and can life ever be explained and seized and ridden like a tamed horse or is it always a mighty sail that carries us in the storm and, when we try to seize it, sweep us into the deep? Sometimes there is a hole in me that seems to extend to the center of the earth. What could fill it? Yearning? Dispair? Happiness? What happiness? Fatigue? Resignation? Death? What am I alive for? Yes, for what am I alive? — Erich Maria Remarque

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

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. — Erich Maria Remarque

Before my mother's tremulous anxiety I recover my composure. Now I can walk about and talk and answer questions without fear of having suddenly to lean against the wall because the world turns soft as rubber and my veins become brimstone. — Erich Maria Remarque

Mirrors are there when we are and yet they never give anything back to us but our own image. Never, never shall we know what they are when they are alone or what is behind them. — Erich Maria Remarque

Ah! Mother, Mother! You still think I am a child - why can I not put my head in your lap and weep? Why have I always to be strong and self-controlled? I would like to weep and be comforted too, indeed I am little more than a child; in the wardrobe still hang short, boy's trousers - it is such a little time ago, why is it over? — Erich Maria Remarque

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. — Erich Maria Remarque

They are more human and more brotherly towards one another, it seems to me, than we are. But perhaps that is merely because they feel themselves to be more unfortunate than us. — Erich Maria Remarque

out my cigarettes, break each one in half and give them to the Russians. They bow to me and then light the cigarettes. Now red points glow in every face. They comfort me; it looks as though there were little windows in dark village cottages saying that behind them are rooms full of peace. The — Erich Maria Remarque

If things went according to death notices, man would be absolutely perfect. There you find only first-class fathers, immaculate husbands, model children, unselfish and self-sacrificing mothers, grandparents mourned by all, businessmen in contrast with whom Francis of Assisi would seem an infinite egoist, generals dripping with kindness, humane prosecuting attorneys, almost holy munitions makers - in short, the earth seems to have been populated by a horde of wingless angels without one's having been aware of it. — Erich Maria Remarque

Beyond this our life did not extend. And of this nothing remains. — Erich Maria Remarque

Any non-commissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, then they are if they were free. — Erich Maria Remarque

He was pious ... He must ... He can't possibly have remembered that this way he would not be allowed to lie in consecrated earth."
"He probably didn't think about it at all. But don't grieve at what your pastor says. I know thousands of very pious Catholics who lie in unconsecrated earth."
"Where?"
"On the battlefields in Russia and France. They lie there all together in mass graves, Catholics and Jews and Protestants, and I don't think it makes a bit of difference to God. — Erich Maria Remarque

Nothing helps," she said, and smiled with an effort. "You forget it for a while - but you don't escape it. — Erich Maria Remarque

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. — Erich Maria Remarque

A neat little apartment with a neat little bourgeois life. A neat little security on the edge of the abyss. Do you really see that? — Erich Maria Remarque

What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love! — Erich Maria Remarque

We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death. We sit
on the edge of it crouching in danger, the grease drips from our hands, in our hearts we are close
to one another, and the hour is like the room: flecked over with the lights and shadows of our
feelings cast by a quiet fire. What does he know of me or I of him? formerly we should not have
had a single thought in common--now we sit with a goose between us and feel in unison, are so
intimate that we do not even speak. — Erich Maria Remarque

He drove the car back through the night to Paris. The hedges and orchards of Normandy flew past him. The moon hung oval and large in the misty sky. The ship was forgotten. Only the landscape remained. The landscape, the smell of hay and ripe apples, the silence and the deep peace of the inevitable — Erich Maria Remarque

I am a modern man with a strong tendency to self-destruction. — Erich Maria Remarque

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. — Erich Maria Remarque

Well, she can go to hell with her whispering and her words. You believe in a miracle, but really it just comes down to loaves of bread. — Erich Maria Remarque

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. — Erich Maria Remarque

Sweet words. Gentle deceptive balm. Help, love, to belong together, to come back again - words, sweet words. Nothing but words. How many words existed for this simple, wild, cruel attraction of two bodies! What a rainbow of imagination, lies, sentiment, and self-deception enclosed it! — Erich Maria Remarque