And in the night you realize, when you wake out of a dream, overcome and captivated by the enchantment of visions that crowd in on each other, just how fragile a handhold, how tenuous a boundary separates us from darkness - we are little flames, inadequately sheltered by thin walls from the tempest of dissolution and insensibility in which we flicker and are often all but extinguished. Then the muted sounds of battle surrounds us, and we creep into ourselves and stare wide-eyed into the night.

— Erich Maria Remarque

And so everything is new and brave, red poppies and good food, cigarettes and summer breeze.

— Erich Maria Remarque

And this I know: all these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death.

— Erich Maria Remarque

...and without love, one is a dead man on furlough, nothing but a scrap of paper with a few dates and a chance name on it, and we as well die.

— Erich Maria Remarque

A neat little apartment with a neat little bourgeois life. A neat little security on the edge of the abyss. Do you really see that?

— Erich Maria Remarque

Anyway, there were thousands of Cantors, all of them convinced that they were acting for the best, in a way that was the most comfortable for themselves. But as far as we are concerned, that is the very root of their moral bankruptcy.

— Erich Maria Remarque

Below there are cyclists, lorries, men; it is a gray street and a gray subway;—it affects me as though it were my mother.

— Erich Maria Remarque

Beside us lies a fair-headed recruit in utter terror. He has buried his face in his hands, his helmet has fallen off. I fish hold of it and try to put it back on his head. He looks up, pushes the helmet off and like a child creeps under my arm, his head close to my breast. The little shoulders heave. Shoulders just like Kemmerich's. I let him be.

— Erich Maria Remarque

Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.

— Erich Maria Remarque

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?

— Erich Maria Remarque