All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
(Bullfinch, Little, Brown and Company, 1930, 1996)
We kno only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land.
Page 21.
It is an Iron law that the soldier must be employed under every circumstance
Page 38.
Revenge is black-pudding.
Page 41.
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 second of life; receives him again and often for ever.
Page 46.
The war has ruined us for everything. We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress.
We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.
Page 69.
It is easier when a man has something to do.
Page 84.
All these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death.
Page 103.
My desires are strangely compounded of yearning and misery.
Pge 109.
Where would a soldier be without tobacco?
Page 112.
I find I do not belong here any more, it is a foreign world. … I prefer to be alone, so that no one troubles me. … They talk too much for me. They have worries, aims, desires, that I cannot comprehend.
Page 122.
The backs of the books stand in rows. I know them all still, I remember arranging them in order. I implore them with me eyes: Speak to me - take me up - take me, life of my Youth - you who are care-free, beautiful - receive me again.
Page 125.
The hours pass quickly if a man broods.
Page 129.
It is when one is alone that one begins to observe Nature and to love her.
Page 135.
A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends.
Page 139.
Now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me.
Page 159.
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.
Page 186.
Here on the borders of death life follows an amazingly simple course, it is limited to what is most necessary, all else lies buried in bloomy sleep … As in a polar expedition, every expression of life must serve only the preservation of existence, and is absolutely focused on that. All else is banished because it would consume energies unnecessarily.
Page 191.
Life is simply one continual war against the menace of death.
Page 191.
There is a very great deal of fraud, injustice, and baseness in the army.
Page 197.
We are not beaten, for as soldiers we are better and more experienced; we are simply crushed and driven back by overwhelming superior forces.
Page 200.
Our hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of rain.
Page 200.
If there is not peace, then there will be revolution.
Page 204.