Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque, born Erich Paul Remark, was a German novelist who created many works about the terror of war. His best known novel All Quiet on the Western Front, about German soldiers in the First World War, was made into an Oscar-winning movie. His book made him an enemy of the Nazis, who burned many of his works...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth22 June 1898
CountryGermany
memories moving men
And even if these scenes from our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might be amongst them and move in them; we might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in the memory; but the man himself it is not.
reality secret desire
It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.
voice darkness stand-by-me
I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness;--I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life...I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me.
gun hands fire
Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.
war shows hospitals
A hospital alone shows what war is.
sleep army expression
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. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.
men thinking order
-Why does a man live? -In order to think about it...
life-is
Our knowledge of life is limited to death
memories rain oxygen
One often feels as though something had happened before, I remember. It comes quite close to you and stands there and you know it was just this way once before, exactly so; for an instant you almost know how it must go on, but then it disappears as you try to lay hold of it like smoke or a dead memory. "We could never remember, Isabelle," I say. "It's like the rain. That has also become one, out of two gasses, oxygen and hydrogen, which no longer remember they were once gasses. Now they are only rain and have no memory of an earlier time.
soldier chance thousand
No soldier outlives a thousand chances.
war losing salute
You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.
teacher home men
The soldier is on friendlier terms than other men with his stomach and intestines. Three-quarters of his vocabulary is derived from these regions, and they give an intimate flavour to expressions of his greatest joy as well as of his deepest indignation. It is impossible to express oneself in any other way so clearly and pithily. Our families and our teachers will be shocked when we go home, but here it is the universal language.
maturity progress culture
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.
morning drinking night
That is the remarkable thing about drinking: it brings people together so quickly, but between night and morning it sets an interval again of years.