We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go outโฆwe creep in upon ourselves and with big eyes stare into the nightโฆand thus we wait for morning.
Erich Maria RemarqueOne often feels as though something had happened before, I remember. It comes quite close to you and stands there and you know it was just this way once before, exactly so; for an instant you almost know how it must go on, but then it disappears as you try to lay hold of it like smoke or a dead memory. "We could never remember, Isabelle," I say. "It's like the rain. That has also become one, out of two gasses, oxygen and hydrogen, which no longer remember they were once gasses. Now they are only rain and have no memory of an earlier time.
Erich Maria RemarqueI had the feeling of slipping down a smooth bottomless pit. It had nothing to do with Breuer and the people. It had nothing to do with Pat even. It was the melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them; that love begins with a human being but does not end in him; and that everything can be there: a human being, love, happiness, life โ and that yet in some terrible way it is always too little, and grows ever less the more it seems.
Erich Maria Remarque