Erich Maria Remarque Quotes

I still have nightmares of dead comrades, a long time ago, talking to me. 'Emmanuel, don't forget about us, don't give up, keep telling our story.'

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century.

I don't think we have to have a personal relation to a life lost to understand that something terrible has taken place, especially in the context of war.

I have been through one war. I have seen the dead piled up and I do not want to see another.

I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes. I see it as a large thing too, only I break it into small units of one man at a time, and see it as a large and monstrous thing for each man involved. I see the war as death in one form or another for men dressed as soldiers, and all the men who survived the war, including myself, I see as men who died with their brothers, dressed as soldiers

I've walked on a lot of battlefields. Most of them are not haunted.

Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, and turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst. All is as usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died. Then I know nothing more.

I need to live my life in the light of their deaths. I need to live.

Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.

It was the beginning of the war. I was twelve years old, my parents were alive, and God still dwelt in our town.

You think the dead we loved truly ever leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly in times of great trouble?

Walk through Santa Monica and try to find somebody who knows a young man or woman who's in this war. Here, war is an intellectual concept. If you lose your son or daughter, it's no longer an intellectual matter.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life…the most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don’t.

My subject is war, and the pity of war.

I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat.

Do you know, sire, I think that if we live to tell our grandchildren about this war, they will accuse us of making it up.' -Marielle

I'm still not sure I didn't die

Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it.

No one in my family or my circle of friends had ever had to confront something like this. Jamie was seventeen, a child on the verge of womanhood, dying and still very much alive at the same time. I was afraid, more afraid than I'd ever been, not only for her, but for me as well. I lived in fear of doing something wrong, of doing something that would offend her. Was it okay to ever get angry in her presence? Was it okay to talk about the future anymore?

Why should I be afraid now? Strange men have come to kill me ever since I was twelve years old.

I have lived through the best years of this country's history. The next generations are going to see war and social calamities. I am glad I don't have to live on into them.

I didn't know what my fate was as far as being alive.

At night my father often heard sporadic gunfire mixed in with the sound of dogs howling. If the war came closer, soon there would be only minor difference between shooting a dog and shooting a man.

Soldiers' graves are the greatest preachers of peace.