Top 100 Remarque's Quotes
#1. There is a lot of evidence to back up the assertion that war fiction takes time. Many all-time classics of the genre, from Erich Maria Remarque's 'All Quiet on the Western Front' to Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22' to Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried,' took over a decade to pen.
Matt Gallagher
#2. There was always a woman with TB in Remarque's books. Frankly I was a little fed up with it.
Per Petterson
#3. I tell you this: it is the most despicable thing of all to drag animals into a war.
Erich Maria Remarque
#4. 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
#5. How various is a face; but an hour ago it was strange and it is now touched with a tenderness that comes, not from it, but from out of the night, the world and the blood, all these things seem to shine in it together.
Erich Maria Remarque
#6. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.
Erich Maria Remarque
#7. Comrade, I say to the dead man, but I say it calmly, today you tomorrow me, but if I come out of it, comrade, I will fight against this, that has struck us both down; from you taken life-and from me-? Life also. I promise you, comrade. It shall never happen again
Erich Maria Remarque
#10. Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.
Erich Maria Remarque
#11. Ravic emptied his glass. He got a package of cigarettes out of his pocket, took one out and lit it. His hands were not yet steady. He flung the match on the floor and ordered another calvados. That face, that smiling face which he thought he had just seen again - he must have been
Erich Maria Remarque
#12. 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
#14. We want to live at any price; so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings which, though they might be ornamental enough in peace-time, would be out of place here.
Erich Maria Remarque
#16. 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.
Erich Maria Remarque
#18. I cannot bear to look at his hands, they are like wax. Under the nails is the dirt of the trenches, it shows through blue-black like poison.
Erich Maria Remarque
#19. 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
#20. Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today - when it meant so little.
Erich Maria Remarque
#21. All that meets me, all that floods over me are but feelings - greed of life, love of home, yearning for the blood, intoxication of deliverance.
Erich Maria Remarque
#23. 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
#24. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.
Erich Maria Remarque
#25. 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.
Erich Maria Remarque
#28. 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
#29. Not everyone's life is like a house that belongs to him and that he can go on decorating ever more richly with the furniture of his memory. Some people live in hotels, in many hotels. The years close behind them like hotel doors - and the only thing that remains is a little courage and no regrets.
Erich Maria Remarque
#30. Yes, that's the way they think, these hundred thousand Kantoreks! Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? That is long ago. We are old folk.
Erich Maria Remarque
#31. I want to think and at the same time that's the last thing in the world I want to do.
Erich Maria Remarque
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.
Erich Maria Remarque
#35. It's all rot that they put in the war-news about the good humour of the troops, how they are arranging dances almost before they are out of the front-line. We don't act like that because we are in a good humour: we are in a good humour because otherwise we should go to pieces.
Erich Maria Remarque
#36. If things went according to the death notices, ... the earth seems to have been populated by a horde of wingless angels without one's having been aware of it. Pure love, which in reality is to be found so seldom, shines on all sides in death, and is the commonest thing of all.
Erich Maria Remarque
#37. 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
#38. 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.
Erich Maria Remarque
#39. Monotonously the lorries sway, monotonously comes the calls, monotonously falls the rain. It falls on our heads and on the heads of the dead up in the line, on the body of the little recruit with the wound that is much too big for his hip; it falls on Kemmerich's grave; it falls in our hearts.
Erich Maria Remarque
#41. Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It's one of the most important secrets of living.
Erich Maria Remarque
#44. You can deceive yourself with truth too. That's an even more dangerous dream.
Erich Maria Remarque
#46. What's the matter with you anyway?" Riesenfeld shouts "You look like a moon-struck kangaroo!
Erich Maria Remarque
#48. But that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.
Erich Maria Remarque
#50. 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.
Erich Maria Remarque
#51. 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
#52. Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.
Erich Maria Remarque
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.
Erich Maria Remarque
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. ...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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.
Erich Maria Remarque
#63. Only the stupid conquer in life; the other man foresees
too many obstacles and becomes uncertain before he starts.
Erich Maria Remarque
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#71. 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
#72. I felt the first soft glow of intoxication that makes the blood warmer and spreads an illusion of adventure over uncertainty.
Erich Maria Remarque
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.
Erich Maria Remarque
#77. 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.
Erich Maria Remarque
#78. 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.
Erich Maria Remarque
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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.
Erich Maria Remarque
#83. 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
#84. And be very careful at the front, Paul."
Ah, Mother, Mother! Why do I not take you in my arms and die with you. What poor wretches we are!
Erich Maria Remarque
#85. What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school?
Erich Maria Remarque
#86. 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!
Erich Maria Remarque
#87. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.
Erich Maria Remarque
#89. 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.
Erich Maria Remarque
#91. 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
#92. My healthy blood was powerless to cure the sick blood of my beloved. That was beyond understanding. And so is death.
Erich Maria Remarque
#94. Cautiously, the mouth applied to the valve, I breathe. The gas still creeps over the ground and sinks into all hollows. Like a big, soft jellyfish it floats into our shell-hole and lolls there obscenely.
Erich Maria Remarque
#96. Nothing helps," she said, and smiled with an effort. "You forget it for a while - but you don't escape it.
Erich Maria Remarque
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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