No soldier outlives a thousand chances.

You may turn into an archangel, a fool, or a criminal—no one will see it. But when a button is missing—everyone sees that.

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.

It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.

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

For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress -- to the future.

Our thoughts are clay, they are moulded with the changes of the days;--when we are resting they are good; under fire, they are dead. Fields of craters within and without.