Top 400 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 7 of 9

301. “I am conscious of the nameless sadness of Time that runs and runs on and changes, and when a man returns he shall find nothing again. – Yes, it is a hard thing to part; but to come back again, that is sometimes far harder.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

302. “That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting. The subject.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

303. “He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

304. “It cannot be that it has gone, the yearning that made our blood unquiet, the unknown, the perplexing, the incoming things, the thousand faces of the future, the melodies from dreams and from books, the whispers and divination of women; it cannot be that this has vanished in bombardment, in despair, in brothels.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

305. “People become melancholic when they start thinking about life. They become cynics because they see what other people do with life.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

306. “Before another three years passed, the book was being burned by the Nazis, who found the depiction of a disillusioned and demoralized German soldiery to be intolerably offensive.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

307. “The noises from outside all merge into one another, become a dream which disappears from the waking memory... he sees the woods and stars behind him, and so he moves on, an ordinary soldier, with his big boots and his webbing and his pack, making his tiny way under the sky’s great vault along the road that lies before him; a soldier who forgets things quickly and who isn’t even depressed much any more, but who just goes onwards under the great night sky.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

308. “It was not the first time I had caught her so. She used to come to us for two hours every morning to clean up the workshop; and though one might leave as much money lying around as one liked she would never disturb it – but schnapps she could smell out as far off as a rat a slice of bacon.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

309. “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

310. “Safe in his cage,′ she repeated. ‘Who wants to be safe in a cage?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

311. “It is when one is alone that one begins to observe Nature and to love her.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

312. “Fate had struck while she sat unsuspecting, had struck somewhere on one of the many curves of this cursed course. The seconds became leaden, the minutes hours. The carrousel on the white ribbon existed now only like a bad dream; her chest became a black cavity, hollowed out with waiting.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

313. “We have to take things as lightly as we can, so we make the most of every opportunity, and nonsense stands stark and immediate beside horror. It cannot be otherwise, that is how we hearten ourselves.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

314. “There is the great sky again, and the stars, and the first streak of dawn, and he is walking beneath that sky, a soldier with big boots and a full belly, a little soldier in the early morning.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

315. “ALREADY KNOW the camp on the moors. It was here that Himmelstoss gave Tjaden his education. But now I know hardly anyone here; as ever, all is altered. There are only a few people that I have occasionally met before. I go through the routine mechanically. In the evenings I generally.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

316. “Why doesn’t she stop worrying? Kemmerich will stay dead whether she knows about it or not. 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

317. “Doesn’t this make you sad, Ferdinand?” He shrugged his shoulders. “Cynical, if you like. One is sad when one thinks about life – cynical when one sees what people make of it.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

318. “Man lives, you’re right! Whoever seeks further is already lost.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

319. “The sergeant comes nearer. “It’s revolution,” he says quietly, “and who isn’t for us is against us.” Willy laughs. “Bloody fine revolution, no mistake! With your Society for the Removal of Shoulder Straps! If that’s all you want – ” He spits contemptuously. “Not so fast, Mate,” says the one-armed man, now walking swiftly toward him. “We do want a lot more! We want an end of war, an end of all this hatred! An end of murder! That’s what we’re after. We want to be men again, not war machines!”

— Erich Maria Remarque

320. “We all feed on one another. Such occasional little sparks of kindliness – that’s something one shouldn’t allow to be taken away. It strengthens one for a difficult life.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

321. “The head-master with the steel watch-chain wants to have at least the whole of Belgium, the coal-areas of France, and a slice of Russia.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

322. “The Front is a cage in which we must await fearfully whatever may happen. We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

323. “It was not any recognition of their beauty and their significance that attracted us, but the communion, the feeling of a comradeship with the things and events of our existence, which cut us off and made the world of our parents a thing incomprehensible to us – for then we surrendered ourselves to events and were lost in them, and the least little thing was enough to carry us down the stream of eternity.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

324. “Suddenly I realized that this was the beginning of a new life. But was it possible to start over again from scratch? To make myself at home in this new, unknown language? And, most frightening of all after all these years of fighting for survival, to learn once more how to live? And if I succeeded in coming back to life, would I not be betraying all my dead friends and loved ones?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

325. “Julge saab olla ainult siis, kui ka hirmu tuntakse.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

326. “But how can a man look after anyone in the field!”

— Erich Maria Remarque

327. “Nobody can deceive a dying farmer!”

— Erich Maria Remarque

328. “It was a long time since I had been in a theatre. And I would not have come now had Pat not wanted it. Theatres, concerts, books – all these middle-class habits I had almost lost. It was not the time for them. Politics provided theatre enough – the shootings every night made another concert – and the gigantic book of poverty was more impressive than any library.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

329. “Perhaps, thought I, perhaps – always that word, one never could escape it. It was certainty we lacked, certainty that everyone and everything lacked.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

330. “The cries continued, it is not men, they could not cry so terribly. ‘Wounded horses’, says Kat. It is is unendurable, it is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror and groaning.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

331. “Das Licht war Gold und das Blau eine letzte, seidene Fahne des Sommers.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

332. “They were living corpses and died like flies in frost. The Small camp was full of them. They were broken and lost and nothing could save them – not even freedom.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

333. “The factory owners in Germany have grown wealthy; – dysentery dissolves our bowels.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

334. “Shortly after the war Valentin had come into a little money, and had been drinking it ever since. He considered it his duty to celebrate his good luck in having come out alive. It was nothing to him that that was now several years ago. One could never celebrate it enough, he used to explain. He was one of those with an uncanny memory of the war. The rest of us had forgotten many things; but he remembered every day and every hour.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

335. “The orchestra sounds a flourish. A chap with a chrysanthemum in his buttonhole comes to the front and explains that a couple will now give a demonstration of the latest thing from Berlin – a fox trot! That is unknown here as yet; we have only heard tell of it.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

336. “It is not against men that we fling our bombs, what do we know of men in this moment when Death is hunting us down?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

337. “There were thousands of Kantoreks, all of whom were convinced that they were acting for the best –.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

338. “And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is. I.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

339. “Those voices mean more than my life, more than mothering and fear, they are the strongest and most protective thing that there is; they are the voices of my pals.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

340. “Don’t take it hardly,” said she, looking at me. “Everything passes.” “True,” said I. “The one sure thing in the world.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

341. “This habit of getting used to things is the reason that we seem to forget so quickly.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

342. “The fellows who write those lies ought to go out and hang themselves.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

343. “And we stand still again, and suddenly we feel that everything out there in front of us, that absolute hell, that ragged patch of shell-holes, is still there inside us.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

344. “The coffins are really for us. The organization surpasses itself in that kind of thing.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

345. “From the kitchen was now issuing the smell of freshly brewed coffee and I heard Frida rumbling about. It was curious, but the smell of coffee made me more cheerful. I knew that from the war; it was never the big things that consoled one – it was always the unimportant, the little things.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

346. “The solicitor for whom he used to work in Cologne has written to tell him that women are now doing the work excellently and more cheaply, whereas Jupp, during his time in the army, will have grown out of office requirements, no doubt. He deeply regrets it, so he says; the times are hard. Best wishes for the future.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

347. “I loved her very much, and it seemed to me that I had never loved her more, even when possessing her, than in this sordid night full of snoring, punctured by the strange hissing sound of urine falling on coal.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

348. “The dark turns into madness. It rocks and rages. Dark things, darker than the night itself, rush upon us in great waves, over us and onwards.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

349. “Parting from my friend Albert Kropp was very hard. But a man gets used to that sort of thing in the army.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

350. “It keeps them going, staves off the evil day when they will be alone. And to be alone, really alone, without illusion, that way lies madness – and suicide.”

— Erich Maria Remarque