Erich Maria Remarque Quotes

Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.

I've crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I've come to a place I never thought I'd have to come to. And I don't know how I got here. It's a strange place. It's a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation.

I feel our relationship to life, to the rest of the world, is very tenuous. It feels fleeting.

Let’s talk, you and I. Let’s talk about fear. The house is empty as I write this; a cold February rain is falling outside. It’s night. Sometimes when the wind blows the way it’s blowing now, we lose the power. But for now it’s on, and so let’s talk very honestly about fear. Let’s talk very rationally about moving to the rim of madnessand... and perhaps over the edge.

I'll tell them that on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I'm afraid it could be taken away.

How little we have, I thought, between us and the waiting cold, the mystery, death--a strip of beach, a hill, a few walls of wood or stone, a little fire--and tomorrow's sun, rising and warming us, tomorrow's hope of peace and better weather . . . What if tomorrow vanished in the storm? What if time stood still? And yesterday--if once we lost our way, blundered in the storm--would we find yesterday again ahead of us, where we had thought tomorrow's sun would rise?

Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.

In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.

Life is an incurable disease.

I don't think I'm invincible.

I don't take things for granted, because everything feels more fragile. It's made me wonder about mortality and how long you've got somebody in the world. I'm more fearful than I used to be.

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

Between the fear that something would happen and the hope that still it wouldn't, there is much more space than one thinks. On that narrow, hard, bare and dark space a lot of us spend their lives.

What, if as said, man is a bubble.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

There are moments when your mind is very vulnerable. You feel a lot of doubts.

The great risk of being alive is always that something can happen to you - or to someone you dearly love - at any moment.

This is who I am: a flyspeck of human vanity in a trillion miles of stone-dead interstellar space; a graceless lump of flesh and fear in a remote desert where nearly everything that I can see or touch is designed to hurt me.

Fear is ubiquitous in human life. It starts in infancy with our primal state of helplessness, where we can see what's going on but we can't move to get it. As we grow older we become a little more able to get what we want but then we're going to die so that gives fear another boost.

Man is a torch borne in the wind; a dream But of a shadow, summed with all his substance.