Top 400 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “We stroll on. Late in the evening we run into Willy and set off together for the barracks. En route Willy suddenly springs to one side and I crouch down likewise. The unmistakable howl of a shell coming – then we look round mystified and laugh. It was merely the screech of an electric tram.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

352. “Dem Soldaten ist sein Magen und seine Verdauung ein vertrauteres Gebiet als jedem anderen Menschen.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

353. “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

354. “One man’s destroyer is another’s nightingale.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

355. “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

356. “Geriau mirti tada, kai dar nori gyventi, negu tada, kai jau nori mirti.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

357. “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

358. “All else went west in the war, but comradeship we did believe in; now only to find that what death could not do, life is achieving; it is driving us asunder.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

359. “The anguish of solitude rises up in me. When Kat is taken away I will not have one friend left.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

360. “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

361. “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

362. “They are different men here, men I cannot properly understand, whom I envy and despise.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

363. “And yes, that’s it, that is what they think, those hundred thousand Kantoreks. Young men of iron. Young? None of us is more than twenty. But young? Young men? That was a long time ago. We are old now.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

364. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

366. “We were never very demonstrative in our family; poor folk who toil and are full of cares are not so. It is not their way to protest what they already know.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

368. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

370. “Nobody can deceive a dying farmer!”

— Erich Maria Remarque

371. “Many slept crouching and the lucky one was he whose bedfellows died in the evening. They were then carried away, and for one night he could stretch out until new arrivals came.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

372. “I find I do not belong here any more, it is a foreign world. Some of these people ask questions, some ask no questions, but no one can see that the latter are proud of themselves for their silence; they often say with a wise air that these things cannot be talked about.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “Had we returned home in 1916, out of the suffering and the strength of our experience we might have unleashed a storm. Now if we go back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope. We will not be able to find our way any more.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

378. “In the afternoon, about three, he is dead. I.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

379. “He it is still and yet it is not he any longer.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

380. “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

381. “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

382. “Yes, I think bitterly, that’s how it is with us, and with all poor people. They don’t dare to ask the price, but worry themselves dreadfully beforehand about it; but the others, for whom it is not important, they settle the price first as a matter of course.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

383. “I was a soldier, and now I am nothing but an agony for myself, for my mother, for everything that is so comfortless and without end. I ought never to have come on leave.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

385. “Life was life, it was worth nothing and everything;.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

386. “The small tool of death was like a dynamo of life.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

388. “That they have, indeed! My sisters tell how they had to scrounge to get the supper together. Twice the gendarmes took everything from them at the station. The third time they sewed the eggs inside their cloaks, put the sausages into their blouses and hid the potatoes in pockets inside their skirts. That time they got through.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

389. “I hadn’t failed, I had gained a second, heaven-sent life with Helen – and even the despair that had come to me and still haunted my sleep from time to time was possible only because there had been something else: Paris, Helen, and the unbelievable feeling of not being alone.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

390. “Where do flies go in winter?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

391. “At last Ferdinand Kosole waltzes off with one, a husky wench with massive breastworks that should afford his gun a good lie. Now all the others are following his lead.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

392. “He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so still and quiet along the entire front line that the army dispatches restricted themselves to a single sentence: that there was nothing new to report on the western front.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

393. “I thought nothing; I didn’t even despair; I was just stupefied and grey and dead.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

394. “The stars are cold.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

395. “And now we realize what is expected – the Americans want to exchange. It is apparent that they have not long been in the war; they are still collecting souvenirs, shoulder straps, badges, belt buckles, decorations, uniform buttons. In exchange we stock ourselves with soap, cigarettes, chocolate and tinned meat. They even want us to take a handful of money for our dog – but we draw the line there; let them offer what they will, the dog stays with us.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

396. “Don’t lose the address,” he said to Bucher. “Be a pity if we lost touch with one another.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

397. “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

398. “To hell with it. What was the use trying to make safe and sure our little life? Sooner or later the great wave must come and sweep it all away. “What about a drink with me, Fred?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

399. “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

400. “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