Top 400 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and again and often forever.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

152. “We live in rooms too much, I say. We think too much in rooms. We make love too much in rooms. We despair too much in rooms. Can you despair in the open?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

153. “Love is not a businessman who wants to see a return on his investments. And imagination needs only a few nails on which to hang its veil. Whether they are of gold, tin, or covered with rust makes no difference to it. Wherever it gets caught, it is caught. Thornbush or rosebush, as soon as the veil of moonlight and mother-of-pearl has fallen on it, either becomes a fairy tale out of A Thousand and One Nights.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

154. “The crowd, still shouting, gives way before us. We plough our way through. Women hold their aprons over their faces and go stumbling away. A roar of fury goes up. A wounded man is being carried off.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

155. “Katczinsky is right when he says it would not be such a bad war if only one could get a little more sleep.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

156. “While they continued to write and talk, we saw the wounded and dying. While they taught that duty to one’s country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

157. “And this I know: all these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

158. “Extraordinary creatures you young people are, altogether. The past you hate, the present you despise, and the future is a matter of indifference. How do you suppose that can lead to any good end?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

159. “When a man has seen so many dead he cannot understand any longer why there should be so much anguish over a single individual.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

160. “It brings a lump into the throat to see how they go over, and run and fall. A man would like to spank them, they are so stupid, and to take them by the arm and lead them away from here where they have no business to be. They wear grey coats and trousers and boots, but for most of them the uniform is far too big, it hangs on their limbs, their shoulders are too narrow, their bodies too slight; no uniform was ever made to these childish measurements.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

161. “Why – the question on which all logic, all philosophy, all science has shattered up to now.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

162. “It is the second night,” he said. “The dangerous night. The charm of the unknown is gone and the charm of familiarity has not yet come. We’ll survive it.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

163. “Help when you can; do everything then – but when you can no longer do anything, forget it! Turn away! Pull yourself together. Compassion is meant for quiet times. Not when life is at stake. Bury the dead and devour life! You’ll still need it. Mourning is one thing, facts are another. One doesn’t mourn less when one sees the facts and accepts them. That is how one survives.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

164. “Here where you stand, a young Etruscan woman stood in just the same way three thousand years ago – and the wind came in just this way from Africa and chased the light across the ocean.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

165. “Ravic emptied his glass. He got a package of cigarettes out of his pocket, took one out and lit it. His hands were not yet steady. He flung the match on the floor and ordered another calvados. That face, that smiling face which he thought he had just seen again – he must have been.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

166. “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

167. “You can’t know anything beforehand. The incurable can survive the healthy. Life is a strange phenomenon.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

168. “I tell you this: it is the most despicable thing of all to drag animals into a war.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

169. “On the steps is a machine-gun ready for action. The square is empty; only the streets that lead into it are jammed with people. It would be madness to go farther – the machine-gun is covering the square.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

170. “No one will understand us – because in front of us there is a generation of men who did, it is true, share the years out here with us, but who already had a bed and a job and who are going back to their old positions, where they will forget all about the war – and behind us, a new generation is growing up, one like we used to be, and that generation will be strangers to us and will push us aside.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

171. “Children, that’s what a man needs – children, who know nothing about it.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

172. “I feel excited; but I do not want to be, for that is not right. I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel the same powerful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books. The breath of desire that then arose from the coloured backs of the books, shall fill me again, melt the heavy, dead lump of lead that lies somewhere in me and waken again the impatience of the future, the quick joy in the world of thought, it shall bring back again.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

173. “The pillars of human society are covetousness, fear, and corruption,” retorted Grau. “Man is evil, but loves the good – when others do it.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

174. “For instance, if you train a dog to eat potatoes and then afterwards put a piece of meat in front of him, he’ll snap at it, it’s his nature. And if you give a man a little bit of authority he behaves just the same way, he snaps at it too.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

175. “He drove the car back through the night to Paris. The hedges and orchards of Normandy flew past him. The moon hung oval and large in the misty sky. The ship was forgotten. Only the landscape remained. The landscape, the smell of hay and ripe apples, the silence and the deep peace of the inevitable.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

176. “Before my mother’s tremulous anxiety I recover my composure. Now I can walk about and talk and answer questions without fear of having suddenly to lean against the wall because the world turns soft as rubber and my veins become brimstone.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

178. “Bertinck has a chest wound. After a while a fragment smashes away his chin, and the same fragment has sufficient force to tear open Leer’s hip. Leer groans as he supports himself on his arm, he bleeds quickly, no one can help him. Like an emptying tube, after a couple of minutes he collapses. What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

179. “I said no more and made off. It is no use quarrelling with excited maternal instincts. They have the moral support of the entire world behind them.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

180. “Well, she can go to hell with her whispering and her words. You believe in a miracle, but really it just comes down to loaves of bread.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

181. “To be alone – the eternal refrain of life. It wasn’t better or worse than anything else. One talked too much about it. One was always and never alone. A violin, suddenly – somewhere out of a twilight – in a garden on the hills around Budapest. The heavy scent of chestnuts. The wind. And dreams crouched on one’s shoulders like young owls, their eyes becoming lighter in the dusk. A night that never became night. The hour when all women were beautiful.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

182. “We are like those abandoned fields full of shell holes in France, no less peaceful than other ploughed lands about them, but in them are lying still the buried explosives, and until these shall have been dug out and cleared away, to plough will be a danger both to the plougher and the ploughed.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

183. “Going away is not always so simple – when one takes oneself along.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

184. “I felt today when the night melted away into a flowering bush and the wind smelled of strawberries and without love one is only a dead man on furlough, nothing but a scrap of paper with a few dates and a chance name on it and one might as well die.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

185. “Those are for us,’ growls Detering. ‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ Kat snaps back at him. ‘You’ll be lucky to get a coffin at all,’ grins Tjaden, ’they’ll just use a tarpaulin to wrap up that target-practice dummy you call a body, you wait and see.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

186. “He it is still and yet it is not he any longer. His features have become uncertain and faint, like a photographic plate from which two pictures have been taken. Even his voice sounds like ashes.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

187. “And in the night you realize, when you wake out of a dream, overcome and captivated by the enchantment of visions that crowd in on each other, just how fragile a handhold, how tenuous a boundary separates us from darkness – we are little flames, inadequately sheltered by thin walls from the tempest of dissolution and insensibility in which we flicker and are often all but extinguished. Then the muted sounds of battle surrounds us, and we creep into ourselves and stare wide-eyed into the night.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

188. “Nachts ist man das, was man eigentlich sein soll; nicht das, was man geworden ist.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

189. “There is no guilt in feelings ever.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

190. “The sergeant major.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

191. “That’s how we are! Afraid of our feelings. And when we become aware of them we immediately think we are swindlers.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

192. “Night is nature’s protest against the leprosy of civilization, Gottfried. No decent man can withstand it for long. He begins to notice that he has been turned out of the silent company of the trees, the animals, the stars, and unconscious life.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

193. “But you will understand me anyways, even without words. Everything is so new to me that I cannot express it; I didn’t know that my breathe could love, that my nails could love, that even my death could love. And I don’t care how much it will last, or whether I can hold it or not, or whether I will be able to express it properly.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

194. “I had the feeling of slipping down a smooth bottomless pit. It had nothing to do with Breuer and the people. It had nothing to do with Pat even. It was the melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them; that love begins with a human being but does not end in him; and that everything can be there: a human being, love, happiness, life – and that yet in some terrible way it is always too little, and grows ever less the more it seems.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

195. “There was always a screen behind which one could hide – a superior who in turn had his superior – orders, instructions, duties, commands – and finally the many-headed monster, morale, necessity, hard reality, responsibility, or whatever it was called – there was always a screen behind which to evade the simple law of humanity.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

196. “That is a generation’s difference these days,” Ferdinand continued. “A lifetime’s difference. A thousand years’ difference. What do you children understand of existence? You’re afraid even of your own feelings. You don’t write letters – you telephone; you don’t dream – you go for week-end excursions; you are rational in love and irrational in politics – a pitiable race.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

197. “How various is a face; but an hour ago it was strange and it is now touched with a tenderness that comes, not from it, but from out of the night, the world and the blood, all these things seem to shine in it together.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

198. “The facts of life are simple and trivial. Only our imagination gives life to them. It makes the laundry pole of facts a flagstaff of dreams.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

200. “Please let the wind of desire that rose from the multi-coloured spines of those books catch me up again, let it melt the heavy, lifeless lead weight that is there somewhere inside me, and awaken in me once again the impatience of the future, the soaring delight in the world of the intellect – let it carry me back into the ready-for-anything lost world of my youth.”

— Erich Maria Remarque