That is the remarkable thing about drinking: it brings people together so quickly, but between night and morning it sets an interval again of years.

(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.

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

Trenches, hospitals, the common grave--there are no other possibilities.

Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today— when it meant so little.

The coffin, it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it

... but that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.