Quotes by Erich Maria Remarque

About Erich Maria Remarque:

Erich Maria Remarque is best-known for his breakthrough novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) about German soldiers in the First World War, which was also made into a Oscar-winning movie. His pacifistic attitudes made him an enemy of the Nazism, who burned many of his works. Remarque later lived in Switzerland and in the United States.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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.

Erich Maria Remarque

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-c...

Erich Maria Remarque

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, hundre...

Erich Maria Remarque

The things men did or felt they had to do.

Erich Maria Remarque

... We had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.

Erich Maria Remarque

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 h...

Erich Maria Remarque

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 l...

Erich Maria Remarque

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

Erich Maria Remarque

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, innoce...

Erich Maria Remarque

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...

Erich Maria Remarque

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

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...

Erich Maria Remarque

We were trained in the army for ten weeks and in this time more profoundly influenced than by ten years at school. We learned that a bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer. At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indif...

Erich Maria Remarque

Obuze, mitraliere, aburi de gaze, flotile de tancuri - strivire, devorare, moarte.

Erich Maria Remarque

Through the years our business has been killing;-it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of lif eis limited to death.

Erich Maria Remarque

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 ...

Erich Maria Remarque

What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!

Erich Maria Remarque

Kiekvieną akimirką jaučiame, kad negalime laimės išlaikyti, ir nė nebandome <...> Bet jeigu mes nemėginame sučiupti jos ir suturėti savo šiurkščiomis rankomis, tai gal ji, niekieno nebaidoma, išlieka mūsų akių gilumoje? Gal ji išliek...

Erich Maria Remarque

Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!

Erich Maria Remarque

- <...> Žmogus nesi jau toks svarbus. - Nesvarbus? - Švarcas vėl pakėlė sutrikusį veidą. - Nesvarbus? Žinoma, ne! Bet malonėkite pasakyti man, kas gi tuomet svarbu, jeigu gyvenimas nebesvarbus? - Niekas, - atsakiau žinodamas, kad tai ir tei...

Erich Maria Remarque

Author Bio

  • NameErich Maria Remarque
  • DescriptionGerman novelist
  • AliasesErich Paul Remark
  • BornJune 22, 1898
  • DiedSeptember 25, 1970
  • CountryGermany; United States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Playwright
  • WorksAll Quiet On The Western Front
  • AwardsGrand Merit Cross Of The Order Of Merit Of The Federal Republic Of Germany