Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.

I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was.

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

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

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

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.

At school nobody ever taught us how to light a cigarette in a storm of rain, nor how a fire could be made with wet wood-nor that it is best to stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn't get jammed, as it does in the ribs.