Erich Maria Remarque citations

“Je voulais dire quelque chose, mais je n'y parvins pas. C'est difficile de trouver des mots lorsqu'on a quelque chose à dire.”

“Personne ne peut t'être plus étranger que la personne que tu as aimée jadis.”

“Ce n'est qu'en se retrouvant toujours seul qu'on connaît le bonheur d'être ensemble.”

“Ce qu'on laisse approcher, on veut le retenir. Et on ne peut rien retenir.”

“On devient mélancolique lorsqu'on pense à la vie… cynique lorsqu'on voit ce qu'en font la plupart des gens.”

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

“With blinded eyes I stared at the sky, this grey, endless sky of a crazy god, who had made life and death for his amusement.”

“It's no shame to be born stupid. Only to die stupid.”

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

“We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”

“It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit.”

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

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

“The death of one man is a just death, the death of two millions is a statistic.”

“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.”

“It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is often brought on by short people. They are so much more energetic and uncompromising than the big fellows.”

“We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Our knowledge of life is limited to death”

“Anything you can settle with money is cheap.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”