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
real war believe
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.
real important boots
We have lost all sense of other considerations, because they are artificial. Only the facts are real and important to us. And good boots are hard to come by." - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 2
reality secret desire
It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.
reality people feelings
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.
risk life-is realizing
Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.
real sadness profound
For a moment I had a strange intuition that just this, and in a real, profound sense, is life; and perhaps happiness even - love with a mixture of sadness, reverence, and silent knowledge.
albert disturbed fired gets groups later men rumours standing
The later it gets the more disturbed the city becomes. I go with Albert through the streets. Men are standing in groups at every corner. Rumours are flying. It is said that the military have already fired on a procession of demonstrating workers.
anyway far life wait war
Anyway the war is over so far as they are concerned. But to wait for dysentery is not much of a life either.
human perhaps towards
They are more human and more brotherly towards one another, it seems to me, than we are. But perhaps that is merely because they feel themselves to be more unfortunate than us.
Any non-commissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, then they are if they were free.
fall rain heart
Monotonously the lorries sway, monotonously come the calls, monotonously falls the rain. It falls on our heads and on the heads of the dead up the line, on the body of the little recruit with the wound that is so much too big for his hip; it falls on Kemmerich's grave; it falls in our hearts.
war rain eye
The storm lashes us, out of the confusion of grey and yellow the hail of splinters whips forth the childlike cries of the wounded, and in the night shattered life groans painfully into silence. Our hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of rain. We do not know whether we are still alive.
ideas important astonishment
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.
war lost-youth quiet
All Quiet on the Western Front.