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"A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world."
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"I claim not to have controlled events but confess plainly that events have controlled me."
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Personal Development
"You're too old for fairy tales, Baasen said."
Author Name
Personal Development
"By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life."
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Personal Development
"There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The real world is oftentimes different from what you expect it to be, what you think it to be, and what people might say it to be."
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Personal Development
"Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens."
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Personal Development
"A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen."
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Personal Development
"But, Henry, this is wicked!' But, Adam, the world is wicked. Maoris prey on Moriori, Whites prey on darker-hued cousins, fleas prey on mice, cats prey on rats, Christians on infidels, first mates on cabin boys, Death on the Living. 'The weak are meat, the strong do eat."
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Personal Development
"It's more real to me here than if I went up," he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other."
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Personal Development
"Some people think the stars must look closer from up here. They don't. When you're up here, you realize how distant they really are-how impossible to reach."
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Personal Development
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"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."
Maturity
"I glance at my boots. They are big and clumsy, the breeches are tucked into them, and standing up one looks well-built and powerful in those great drainpipes. But when we go bathing and strip, suddenly we have slender legs again and slight shoulders. We are no longer soldiers but little more than boys; no one would believe that we could carry packs. It is a strange moment when we stand naked; then we become civilians, and almost feel ourselves to be so. When bathing Franz Kemmerich looked as slight and frail as a child. There he lies now - buy why? The whole world ought to pass by this bed and say: 'That is Franz Kemmerich, nineteen and a half years old, he doesn't want to die. Let him not die!"
War
"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war."
War
"And so everything is new and brave, red poppies and good food, cigarettes and summer breeze."
Joy
"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 like caps, pulled over the white-washed, half-timbered houses, its corn-fields, gleaming like mother-of-pearl in the slanting light, its orchards, its barns and old lime trees. The names of the stations begin to take on meaning and my heart trembles. The train stamps and stamps onward. I stand at the window and hold on to the frame. These names mark the boundaries of my youth."
Travel
"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 that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony - Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?"
Survival
"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, innocently slay one another."
War
"A man has to have something he can put faith in. Can't you see that? What I want is someone that will love me, she would have me and I her. Otherwise a man may just go hang himself."
Religion
"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 indifferent, we recognised that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but drill. We became soldiers with eagerness and enthusiasm, but they have done everything to knock that out of us. After three weeks it was no longer incomprehensible to us that a braided postman should have more authority over us than had formerly our parents, our teachers, and the whole gamut of culture from Plato to Goethe."
Memory
"No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck."
Imagination
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