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

Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.

Erich Maria Remarque

perfect museums

Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!

Erich Maria Remarque

strange complicated feels

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

Erich Maria Remarque

important simple secret

We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth.

Erich Maria Remarque

our-dreams bears dream

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

sadness real profound

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.

Erich Maria Remarque

stars dark night

Anything you can settle with money is cheap.

Erich Maria Remarque

settling

we have so much to say, and we shall never say it.

Erich Maria Remarque

It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.

Erich Maria Remarque

terrible waiting

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.

Erich Maria Remarque

giving lying thinking

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

arms want men

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

generations way world

Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.

Erich Maria Remarque

knows may

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

Erich Maria Remarque

modesty rewards novel

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

eyebrows bird moving

To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.

Erich Maria Remarque

secret littles memories

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

adventure war book

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

Erich Maria Remarque

realizing risk life-is

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

silence sorrow years

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.

Erich Maria Remarque

disease dying brother