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All Quiet on the Western Front QUOTES

All Quiet on the Western Front QUOTES

1 " Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting "

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front

2 " 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. "

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front

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

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front

4 " Our knowledge of life is limited to death "

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front

5 " 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. "

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front

6 " But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony--Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? "

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front

7 " We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost. "

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front

8 " 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. "

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front

9 " We came to realise - first with astonishment, then bitterness, and finally with indifference - that intellect apparently wasn't the most important thing...not ideas, but the system; not freedom, but drill. We had joined up with enthusiasm and with good will; but they did everything to knock that out of us. "

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front

10 " Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world. "

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front

11 " A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is only one hospital, a 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. "

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front

12 " We're no longer young men. We've lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We've been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don't believe in those things any more; we believe in the war. "

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front

13 " 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 , All Quiet on the Western Front

14 " We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad. "

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front

15 " The things men did or felt they had to do. "

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front

16 " I lie down on many a station platform; I stand before many a soup kitchen; I squat on many a bench;--then at last the landscape becomes disturbing, mysterious, and familiar. It glides past the western windows with its villages, their thatched roofs like caps, pulled over the white-washed, half-timbered houses, its corn-fields, gleaming like mother-of-pearl in the slanting light, its orchards, its barns and old lime trees.

The names of the stations begin to take on meaning and my heart trembles. The train stamps and stamps onward. I stand at the window and hold on to the frame. These names mark the boundaries of my youth. "

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front

17 " Beside us lies a fair-headed recruit in utter terror. He has buried his face in his hands, his helmet has fallen off. I fish hold of it and try to put it back on his head. He looks up, pushes the helmet off and like a child creeps under my arm, his head close to my breast. The little shoulders heave. Shoulders just like Kemmerich's. I let him be. "

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front

18 " The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces. "

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front

19 " From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us--mostly from the earth. 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 fro ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever. "

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front

20 " 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. "

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front