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"He wants me to tell him about the front; he is curious in a way that I find stupid and distressing; I no longer have any real contact with him. There is nothing he likes more than just hearing about it. I realize he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them. What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us?"
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"His abusemakes her an anvilwithout spark."
"Many call it the 1000 yard stare and can't realize the pain when PTSD takes us there."
"I've seen a lot of stuff, maybe I've seen too much. I see most humans in a bad light because I've seen what they can do, how evil they can be, I've seen the Holocaust and I've seen Jonestown, I've seen the Vietnam War and I've seen Hiroshima, I've seen the Chernobyl disaster, I've seen the World Trade Center attack, I've been alive too long, over a hundred years is a long time to be alive, Alecto sighed, staring at the cigarette he was holding."
"I'd still thought that everything I thought about that night-the shame, the fear-would fade in time. But that hadn't happened. Instead, the things that I remembered, these little details, seemed to grow stronger, to the point where I could feel their weight in my chest. Nothing, however stuck with me more than the memory of stepping into that dark room and what I found there, and how the light then took that nightmare and made it real."
"But I don't know what to him about the aftermath of killing a person. About how they never leave you."
"If the most connected we've ever felt with another person was in that brief moment of apology and regret after physical abuse, then we'll seek that abuse for the rest of our lives."
"I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college."
"Wait-a-minute!Reality kicked in after marking its spot `position vacant' for the short and pleasant while. He groaned mournfully as he found himself staring at the inside of his own eyelids. The first thing that occurred to him was the terrible bone-wracking pain running up and down his spine. Pain? No, curiously enough. It was the memory of it that seemed to hurt so much. Maybe that's what scared him. Or maybe it was the creaking of the ship around him."
"Between 60 and 80 percent of strippers come from a background of sexual abuse."
Explore more quotes by Erich Maria Remarque
"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 want to live at any price; so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings which, though they might be ornamental enough in peace-time, would be out of place here."
"Sweet words. Gentle deceptive balm. Help, love, to belong together, to come back again- words, sweet words. Nothing but words. How many words existed for this simple, wild, cruel attraction of two bodies! What a rainbow of imagination, lies, sentiment, and self-deception enclosed it!"
"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 head close to my breast. The little shoulders heave. Shoulders just like Kemmerich's. I let him be."
"Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world."
"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-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is."
"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."
"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."
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