Today the aggressor is the shepherd of peace, and the beaten and hunted are the troublemakers of the world. What’s more, there are whole races who believe it!
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.
The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.
Petnaest srećnih godina su kratke – odgovorih. Petnaest nesrećnih godina su duge i pružaju čoveku mnogo iskustva.
Sometimes I used to think that one day i should wake up, and all that had been would be over. forgotten, sunk, drowned. Nothing was sure – not even memory.
Может быть, у смерти совсем другое имя. Мы ведь видим ее всегда только с одной стороны. Может быть, смерть – это совершенная любовь между нами и Богом.
It’s not much. You begin by thinking there is something extraordinary about it. But you’ll find out, when you’ve been out in the world a while longer, unhappiness is the commonest thing there is.
We don’t act like that because we are in good humor we are in a good humor because otherwise we should go to pieces.
We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.
Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades – words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.
We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad.
Give ’em all the same grub and all the same pay/And the war would be over and done in a day.” – All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 3
We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither know nor can determine where it will fall.” – All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 6
The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.
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
And this I know: 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.
A man dreams of a miracle and wakes up to loaves of bread.
And be very careful at the front, Paul.”Ah, Mother, Mother! Why do I not take you in my arms and die with you. What poor wretches we are!
Where would the world be if we took every man to book? There were thousands of Kantoreks, all of whom were convinced that they were acting for the best- in a way that cost them nothing.
Then we change our possy and lie down again to play cards. We know how to do that: to play cards, to swear, and to fight. Not much for twenty years;–and yet too much for twenty years.
we developed a firm, practical feeling of solidarity, which grew, on the battlefield, into the best thing that the war produced – comradeship in arms.
our heads were full of nebulous ideas, which cast an idealized, almost romantic glow over life
If only they would not look at one so-What great misery can be in two such small spots, no bigger than a man’s thumb-in their eyes!
When we love each other we are immortal and indestructible like the heartbeat and the rain and the wind.
We were never very demonstrative in our family; poor folk who toil and are full of cares are not so. It is not their way to protest what they already know. When my mother says to me “dear boy,” it means much more than when another uses it.
Here I sit and there you are lying; we have so much to say, and we shall never say it.
The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas those who were better off, and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be, were beside themselves with joy.
We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.
And so everything is new and brave, red poppies and good food, cigarettes and summer breeze.
Below there are cyclists, lorries, men; it is a grey street and a grey subway;—it affects me as though it were my mother.
The best way to lose a woman was to show her a kind of life that one could offer her for only a few days.
One lost easiest what one held in one’s arms— never what one left.
You can deceive yourself with truth too. That’s an even more dangerous dream.
To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There’s much too little forgetting.
the invisible storehouse in nothingness, called memory.
There had never been any more between us thanchance had brought. But perhaps that makes a greater indebtednessand binds closer than much else
…and without love, one is a dead man on furlough, nothing but a scrap of paper with a few dates and a chance name on it, and we as well die.
We will make ourselves comfortable and sleep, and eat as much as we can stuff into our bellies, and drink and smoke so that hours are not wasted. Life is short.
What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!
Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!
My healthy blood was powerless to cure the sick blood of my beloved. That was beyond understanding. And so is death.
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.
Anyway, there were thousands of Kantoreks, all of them convinced that they were acting for the best, in a way that was the most comfortable for themselves.But as far as we are concerned, that is the very root of their moral bankruptcy.
No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.
A neat little apartment with a neat little bourgeois life. A neat little security on the edge of the abyss. Do you really see that?
Suddenly he knew all the things he should have said.