{"author":"Erich Maria Remarque","author_id":"Erich+Maria+Remarque","total_quotes":90,"quotes":[{"text":"A man dreams of a miracle and wakes up to loaves of bread.","author":"Erich Maria Remarque","tags":["all-quiet-on-the-western-front","front-lines","miracle","miracles","soldiers","war","wwi"],"id":8150,"author_id":"Erich+Maria+Remarque"},{"text":"Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.","author":"Erich Maria Remarque","tags":["all-quiet-on-the-western-front","germany","indignation","inspirational","literature","reality","soldiers","truth","war","west","world-war","world-war-2"],"id":9534,"author_id":"Erich+Maria+Remarque"},{"text":"Sweet words. Gentle deceptive balm. Help, love, to belong together, to come back again— words, sweet words. Nothing but words. How many words existed for this simple, wild, cruel attraction of two bodies! What a rainbow of imagination, lies, sentiment, and self-deception enclosed it!","author":"Erich Maria Remarque","tags":["illusion","love"],"id":10229,"author_id":"Erich+Maria+Remarque"},{"text":"Beside us lies a fair-headed recruit in utter terror. He has buried his face in his hands, his helmet has fallen off. I fish hold of it and try to put it back on his head. He looks up, pushes the helmet off and like a child creeps under my arm, his head close to my breast. The little shoulders heave. Shoulders just like Kemmerich's. I let him be.","author":"Erich Maria Remarque","tags":["camaraderie","war"],"id":17067,"author_id":"Erich+Maria+Remarque"},{"text":"These memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow-- a vast, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires-- but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us. They are completely lost to us. They arise no more; we are dead and they stand remote on the horizon, they are a mysterious reflection, an apparition that haunts us, that we fear and love without hope. They are unattainable and we know it.And even if these scenes of our youth were given back to us, we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in memory; but the man himself it is not.","author":"Erich Maria Remarque","tags":["lost-youth","memories","memory"],"id":18908,"author_id":"Erich+Maria+Remarque"},{"text":"We were trained in the army for ten weeks and in this time more profoundly influenced than by ten years at school. We learned that a bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer. At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent, we recognised that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but drill. We became soldiers with eagerness and enthusiasm, but they have done everything to knock that out of us. After three weeks it was no longer incomprehensible to us that a braided postman should have more authority over us than had formerly our parents, our teachers, and the whole gamut of culture from Plato to Goethe.","author":"Erich Maria Remarque","tags":["army","descipline","war"],"id":31680,"author_id":"Erich+Maria+Remarque"},{"text":"To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and again and often forever.","author":"Erich Maria Remarque","tags":["war"],"id":35258,"author_id":"Erich+Maria+Remarque"},{"text":"One lost easiest what one held in one’s arms— never what one left.","author":"Erich Maria Remarque","tags":["heartache","loss","love"],"id":63773,"author_id":"Erich+Maria+Remarque"},{"text":"Actually, what does man live for?” “To think about it. Any other question?” “Yes. Why does he die just when he has done that and has become a bit more sensible?” “Some people die without having become more sensible.” “Don’t evade my question. And don’t start talking about the transmigration of souls.” “I’ll ask you something else first. Lions kill antelopes; spiders flies; foxes chickens; which is the only race in the world that wars on itself uninterruptedly, fighting and killing one another?” “Those are questions for children. The crown of creation, of course, the human being— who invented the words love, kindness, and mercy.” “Good. And who is the only being in Nature that is capable of committing suicide and does it?” “Again the human being— who invented eternity, God, and resurrection.” “Excellent,” Ravic said. “You see of how many contradictions we consist. And you want to know why we die?","author":"Erich Maria Remarque","tags":["human-nature","life","life-irony","life-philosophy","meaning-of-life"],"id":64095,"author_id":"Erich+Maria+Remarque"},{"text":"And this I know: all these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death.","author":"Erich Maria Remarque","tags":["after-war","all-quiet-on-the-western-front","life-and-death","soldier","soldiers","war","wwi"],"id":68516,"author_id":"Erich+Maria+Remarque"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":90,"pages":9,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}