Erich Maria Remarque Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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