Quote

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world and we had to shoot it to pieces.

Erich Maria Remarque

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Shoot
Fronts
Pieces
Love
Life
World
Eighteen
Begun

More quotes by Erich Maria Remarque

Image
The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.
Erich Maria Remarque
Image
I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was.
Erich Maria Remarque
Image
The war has ruined us for everything.
Erich Maria Remarque
Image
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
Image
Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.
Erich Maria Remarque
Image
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
Image
It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hour's bombardment unscratched. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.
Erich Maria Remarque
Image
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.
Erich Maria Remarque
Image
-Why does a man live? -In order to think about it.
Erich Maria Remarque
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Erich Maria Remarque
Image
Good or ill, life is life you only realize that when you have to risk it.
Erich Maria Remarque
Image
Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.
Erich Maria Remarque
Image
... but that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.
Erich Maria Remarque
Image
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
Erich Maria Remarque
Image
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
Image
Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!
Erich Maria Remarque
Image
A hospital alone shows what war is.
Erich Maria Remarque
Image
I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness--I belong to them and they to me we all share the same fear and the same life...I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me.
Erich Maria Remarque