The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.

They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.

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

Keep things at arm's length... If you let anything come too near you want to hold on to it. And there is nothing a man can hold on to.

The soldier is on friendlier terms than other men with his stomach and intestines. Three-quarters of his vocabulary is derived from these regions, and they give an intimate flavour to expressions of his greatest joy as well as of his deepest indignation. It is impossible to express oneself in any other way so clearly and pithily. Our families and our teachers will be shocked when we go home, but here it is the universal language.

To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.