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@xy, member from Sept. 25, 2023

Favourite quotes (21448)

“It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.”

Erich Maria Remarque book Three Comrades

Source: Three Comrades

“Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”

Erich Maria Remarque book All Quiet on the Western Front

Paul to the corpse of a French man he has just killed, Ch. 9
Source: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
Context: I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony — Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?

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

Erich Maria Remarque book Three Comrades

Source: Three Comrades

“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 book Three Comrades

Source: Three Comrades

“Why does a man live?
-In order to think about it…”

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) German novelist

Source: Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

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

Erich Maria Remarque book Three Comrades

Source: Three Comrades

“We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out…we creep in upon ourselves and with big eyes stare into the night…and thus we wait for morning.”

Erich Maria Remarque book All Quiet on the Western Front

Source: All Quiet on the Western Front

“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.”

Erich Maria Remarque book Three Comrades

Source: Three Comrades

“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.”

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) German novelist

“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 book Three Comrades

Source: Three Comrades

“Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.”

Erich Maria Remarque book Three Comrades

Source: Three Comrades

“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 book All Quiet on the Western Front

Source: All Quiet on the Western Front

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

Erich Maria Remarque book The Black Obelisk

Source: The Black Obelisk

“Anything you can settle with money is cheap.”

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) German novelist

Source: Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“Our knowledge of life is limited to death”

Erich Maria Remarque book All Quiet on the Western Front

Source: All Quiet on the Western Front

“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.”

Erich Maria Remarque book All Quiet on the Western Front

Source: All Quiet on the Western Front

“Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.”

Erich Maria Remarque book All Quiet on the Western Front

Source: All Quiet on the Western Front

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

Erich Maria Remarque book All Quiet on the Western Front

Source: All Quiet on the Western Front

“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.”

Erich Maria Remarque book Three Comrades

Source: Three Comrades

“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 book Three Comrades

Source: Three Comrades