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

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.

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

Suddenly I become filled with a consuming impatience to be gone.

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

Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.

But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony - forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?