E Remarque Quotes

#1. 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

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

Erich Maria Remarque

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

Erich Maria Remarque

#4. Suddenly he knew all the things he should have said.

Erich Maria Remarque

#5. We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither know nor can determine where it will fall.
- All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 6

Erich Maria Remarque

#6. Then we change our possy and lie down again to play cards. We know how to do that: to play cards, to swear, and to fight. Not much for twenty years;
and yet too much for twenty years.

Erich Maria Remarque

#7. Love, he thought. That too is love. The old miracle. It not only casts a rainbow of dreams against the gray sky of facts - it also sheds romantic light upon a heap of dung - a miracle and a mad mockery. Suddenly he had the strange feeling of having become, in a remote way, an accomplice.

Erich Maria Remarque

#8. 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?

Erich Maria Remarque

#9. 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

#10. It's a primary law of this world that the old rule the young, that one must serve mine's time. It is no question of ability. Else what would become of the old dodderers who cling to power?

Erich Maria Remarque

#11. No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.

Erich Maria Remarque

#12. Once more, dully menacing, comes the noise of gunfire, and already from afar, like the bill of a woodpecker, sounds the knock-knocking of a machine gun. We grow calm and are almost glad to hear again the familiar, trusty noises of death.

Erich Maria Remarque

#13. He's afraid," Graber said.
"Yes, naturally. But he's a good dog."
"And a man-eater."
"We're all that."
"Why?"
"We are. And we think, just like that dog, that we are still good. And just like him we are looking for a bit of warmth and light and friendship.

Erich Maria Remarque

#14. ...but a sense of strangeness will not leave me. I cannot feel at home among these things. There is my mother, there is my sister, there my case of butterflies, and there the mahogony piano, but I am not myself there. There is a distance, a veil between us.

Erich Maria Remarque

#15. We get back pretty well. There is no further attack by the enemy. We lie for an hour panting and resting before anyone speaks. We are so completely played out that in spite of our great hunger we do not think of the provisions. Then gradually we become something like men again.

Erich Maria Remarque

#16. Heaven Has No Favorites

Erich Maria Remarque

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

Erich Maria Remarque

#18. What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!

Erich Maria Remarque

#19. Only the stupid conquer in life; the other man foresees
too many obstacles and becomes uncertain before he starts.

Erich Maria Remarque

#20. Human beings are a much worse poison than schnapps or tobacco.

Erich Maria Remarque

#21. Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.

Erich Maria Remarque

#22. 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

#23. 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.

Erich Maria Remarque

#24. 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.

Erich Maria Remarque

#25. up to the belly. When the attack starts I will let myself fall into the water, with my face as deep in the mud as I can keep it without suffocating. I must pretend to be dead. Suddenly

Erich Maria Remarque

#26. The sergeant major

Erich Maria Remarque

#27. 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

#28. I felt the first soft glow of intoxication that makes the blood warmer and spreads an illusion of adventure over uncertainty.

Erich Maria Remarque

#29. Today we have done an hour's saluting drill because Tjaden failed to salute a major smartly enough. Kat can't get it out of his head. "You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well," he says. Kropp

Erich Maria Remarque

#30. 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