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It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.

Erich Maria Remarque

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Erich Maria Remarque
Age: 72 †
Born: 1898
Born: June 22
Died: 1970
Died: September 25
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Vienna
Austria
Erich Paul Remark
Erich Maria Remark
Satisfy
Melancholy
Desires
Secret
Desire
Reality
Never
Arouse

More quotes by Erich Maria Remarque

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We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.
Erich Maria Remarque
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The crowd, still shouting, gives way before us. We plough our way through. Women hold their aprons over their faces and go stumbling away. A roar of fury goes up. A wounded man is being carried off.
Erich Maria Remarque
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(Ravic speaking of a butterfly caught in the Louvre) In the morning it would search for flowers and life and the light honey of blossoms and would not find them and later it would fall asleep on millennial marble, weakened by then, until the grip of the delicate, tenacious feet loosened and it fell, a thin leaf of premature autumn.
Erich Maria Remarque
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We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war. - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 5
Erich Maria Remarque
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The coffin, it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it
Erich Maria Remarque
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It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.
Erich Maria Remarque
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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.
Erich Maria Remarque
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It's all rot that they put in the war-news about the good humour of the troops, how they are arranging dances almost before they are out of the front-line. We don't act like that because we are in a good humour: we are in a good humour because otherwise we should go to pieces.
Erich Maria Remarque
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For a moment I had a strange intuition that just this, and in a real, profound sense, is life and perhaps happiness even - love with a mixture of sadness, reverence, and silent knowledge.
Erich Maria Remarque
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Courage is the fairest adornment of youth.
Erich Maria Remarque
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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
Erich Maria Remarque
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You may turn into an archangel, a fool, or a criminal—no one will see it. But when a button is missing—everyone sees that.
Erich Maria Remarque
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-Why does a man live? -In order to think about it.
Erich Maria Remarque
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... but that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.
Erich Maria Remarque
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But probably that's the way of the world - when we have finally learned something we're too old to apply it - and so it goes, wave after wave, generation after generation. No one learns anything at all from anyone else.
Erich Maria Remarque
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No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.
Erich Maria Remarque
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A hospital alone shows what war is.
Erich Maria Remarque
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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…we creep in upon ourselves and with big eyes stare into the night…and thus we wait for morning.
Erich Maria Remarque
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Trenches, hospitals, the common grave--there are no other possibilities.
Erich Maria Remarque
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Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.
Erich Maria Remarque