Anything you can settle with money is cheap.

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.

And even if these scenes from 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 be amongst them and move in them; 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 the memory; but the man himself it is not.

Katczinsky says it is all to do with education - it softens the brain.

A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world.

It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.

Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!