Erich Maria Remarque

He looked around. The room, a few suitcases, some belongings, a handful of well-read books_ a man needed few things to live. And it was good not to get used to many things when life was unsettled. Again and again one had to abandon them or they were taken away. One should be ready to leave every day. That was the reason he had lived alone_ when one was on the move one should not have anything that could bind one. Nothing that could stir the heart. The adventure_ but nothing more.

A man has to have something he can put faith in.

I have awaited a storm that should deliver me, pluck me away and now it has come softly, even without my knowledge. But it is here. While I was despairing, thinking everything lost, it was already quietly growing. I had thought that division was always an end. Now I know that growth also is division. And growth means relinquishing. And growth has no end.

There had never been any more between us thanchance had brought. But perhaps that makes a greater indebtednessand binds closer than much else

the invisible storehouse in nothingness, called memory.

These memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow-- a vast, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires-- but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us. They are completely lost to us. They arise no more; we are dead and they stand remote on the horizon, they are a mysterious reflection, an apparition that haunts us, that we fear and love without hope. They are unattainable and we know it.And even if these scenes of our youth were given back to us, we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in memory; but the man himself it is not.

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

You can deceive yourself with truth too. That's an even more dangerous dream.

Actually, what does man live for?_ __o think about it. Any other question?_ __es. Why does he die just when he has done that and has become a bit more sensible?_ __ome people die without having become more sensible._ __on__ evade my question. And don__ start talking about the transmigration of souls._ ____l ask you something else first. Lions kill antelopes; spiders flies; foxes chickens; which is the only race in the world that wars on itself uninterruptedly, fighting and killing one another?_ __hose are questions for children. The crown of creation, of course, the human being_ who invented the words love, kindness, and mercy._ __ood. And who is the only being in Nature that is capable of committing suicide and does it?_ __gain the human being_ who invented eternity, God, and resurrection._ __xcellent,_ Ravic said. __ou see of how many contradictions we consist. And you want to know why we die?

One lost easiest what one held in one__ arms_ never what one left.

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.

The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.

For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress -- to the future.

He__ afraid," Graber said."Yes, naturally. But he__ a good dog.""And a man-eater.""We__e 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.

Close behind us were our friends: Tjaden, a skinny locksmith of our own age, the biggest eater of the company. He sits down to eat as thin as a grasshopper and gets up as big as a bug in the family way; Haie Westhus, of the same age, a peat-digger, who can easily hold a ration-loaf in his hand and say: Guess what I've got in my fist; then Detering, a peasant, who thinks of nothing but his farm-yard and his wife; and finally Stanislaus Katczinsky, the leader of our group, shrewd, cunning, and hard-bitten, forty years of age, with a face of the soil, blue eyes, bent shoulders, and a remarkable nose for dirty weather, good food, and soft jobs.

And so everything is new and brave, red poppies and good food, cigarettes and summer breeze.

Below there are cyclists, lorries, men; it is a grey street and a grey subway;__t affects me as though it were my mother.

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.