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

"Our heads were full of nebulous ideas, which cast an idealized, almost romantic glow over life."

"Any non-commissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, then they are if they were free."

"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!"

"From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us - mostly from the earth. 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 fro ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever."

"The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom."

"A man dreams of a miracle and wakes up to loaves of bread."

"Close behind us were our friends: Tjaden, a skinny locksmith of our own age, the biggest eater of the company. He sits down to eat as thin as a grasshopper and gets up as big as a bug in the family way; Haie Westhus, of the same age, a peat-digger, who can easily hold a ration-loaf in his hand and say: Guess what I've got in my fist; then Detering, a peasant, who thinks of nothing but his farm-yard and his wife; and finally Stanislaus Katczinsky, the leader of our group, shrewd, cunning, and hard-bitten, forty years of age, with a face of the soil, blue eyes, bent shoulders, and a remarkable nose for dirty weather, good food, and soft jobs."

"A hospital alone shows what war is."

"To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting."

"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 forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial-I believe we are lost."

"Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting."

"What's going on outside, Ravic? 'Nothing new, Kate. The world goes on eagerly preparing for suicide and at the same time deluding itself about what it's doing. 'Will there be war? 'Everyone knows that there will be war. What one does not yet know is when. Everyone expects a miracle. Ravic smiled. 'Never before have I seen so many politicians who believe in miracles as at present in France and England. And never so few as in Germany. She remained lying silent for a while. 'To think that it should be possible- she said then. 'Yes- it seems so impossible that it will happen some day. Just because one considers it so impossible and doesn't protect oneself against it."

"The days are hot and the dead lie unburied. We cannot fetch them all in, if we did we should not know what to do with them. The shells will bury them."

"He's afraid,' Graber said.'Yes, naturally. But he's a good dog.'And a man-eater.'We're all that.'Why?'We are. And we think, just like that dog, that we are still good. And just like him we are looking for a bit of warmth and light and friendship."

"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!"

"The later it gets the more disturbed the city becomes. I go with Albert through the streets. Men are standing in groups at every corner. Rumours are flying. It is said that the military have already fired on a procession of demonstrating workers."

"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."

"The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces."

"The tension has worn us out. It is a deadly tension that feels as if a jagged knife blade is being scraped along the spine. Our legs won't function, our hands are trembling and our bodies are like thin membranes stretched over barely repressed madness, holding in what would otherwise be an unrestrained outburst of endless scream.s. We have no flesh, no muscle now."

"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."

"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."

"My healthy blood was powerless to cure the sick blood of my beloved. That was beyond understanding. And so is death."

"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 it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We've been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don't believe in those things any more; we believe in the war."

"He looked around. The room, a few suitcases, some belongings, a handful of well-read books- a man needed few things to live. And it was good not to get used to many things when life was unsettled. Again and again one had to abandon them or they were taken away. One should be ready to leave every day. That was the reason he had lived alone- when one was on the move one should not have anything that could bind one. Nothing that could stir the heart. The adventure- but nothing more."

"On the steps is a machine-gun ready for action. The square is empty; only the streets that lead into it are jammed with people. It would be madness to go farther - the machine-gun is covering the square."

"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."

"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 seconds of life; receives him again and again and often forever."

"One lost easiest what one held in one's arms- never what one left."

"The invisible storehouse in nothingness, called memory."

"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."

"We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad."

"There was always a screen behind which one could hide- a superior who in turn had his superior- orders, instructions, duties, commands- and finally the many-headed monster, morale, necessity, hard reality, responsibility, or whatever it was called- there was always a screen behind which to evade the simple law of humanity."

"Love should not be polluted with friendship."

"Suddenly he knew all the things he should have said."

"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!"

"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."

"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."

"Anyway the war is over so far as they are concerned. But to wait for dysentery is not much of a life either."

"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 in the night you realize, when you wake out of a dream, overcome and captivated by the enchantment of visions that crowd in on each other, just how fragile a handhold, how tenuous a boundary separates us from darkness - we are little flames, inadequately sheltered by thin walls from the tempest of dissolution and insensibility in which we flicker and are often all but extinguished. Then the muted sounds of battle surrounds us, and we creep into ourselves and stare wide-eyed into the night."

"I have awaited a storm that should deliver me, pluck me away and now it has come softly, even without my knowledge. But it is here. While I was despairing, thinking everything lost, it was already quietly growing. I had thought that division was always an end. Now I know that growth also is division. And growth means relinquishing. And growth has no end."

"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?"

"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."

"One always expects something else."

"A crude age. Peace is stabilized with cannon and bombers, humanity with concentration camps and pogroms. We're living in a time when all standards are turned upside-down, Kern. 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!"

"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."