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Mirrors are there when we are and yet they never give anything back to us but our own image. Never, never shall we know what they are when they are alone or what is behind 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
Never
Behinds
Behind
Shall
Alone
Give
Anything
Back
Mirrors
Giving
Image

More quotes by Erich Maria Remarque

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Sweet dreams though the guns are booming.
Erich Maria Remarque
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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
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Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.
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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I, too, am going to go away soon,' she says, 'I am weary and weary of my weariness. Everything is beginning to be a little empty and full of leave-taking and melancholy and waiting.
Erich Maria Remarque
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To me the front is a mysterious whirlpool. Though I am in still water far away from its centre, I feel the whirl of the vortex sucking me slowly, irresistibly, inescapably into itself.
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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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.
Erich Maria Remarque
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Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!
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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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
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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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Good or ill, life is life you only realize that when you have to risk it.
Erich Maria Remarque
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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.
Erich Maria Remarque
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Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.
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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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
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The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.
Erich Maria Remarque
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My rage outweighs my shame, as always happens when one is really ashamed and knows he ought to be.
Erich Maria Remarque
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It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.
Erich Maria Remarque