All Quiet on the Western Front - Quotations

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escape shells, were destroyed by the war. (p1)

While they continued to write and talk, we saw the wounded and dying. While they taught that duty to one’s country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger.

… we distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that nothing of their world left. (p7-8)

Yes, that’s the way they think, these hundred thousand Kantoreks! Youth! … Youth? That is long ago. We are old folks.

All the older men are linked up with their previous life. They have wives, children, occupations, and interests, they have a background which is so strong that the war cannot obliterate it. We young men of twenty, however, have only our parents, and some, perhaps a girl… some enthusiasm, a few hobbies, and our school. Beyond this our life did not extend. And of this nothing remains. (p11)

We had as yet taken no root.

We have lost all sense of other considerations, because they are artificial. Only the facts are real and important for us. And good boots are scarce. (p12)

At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent. We recognized that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but drill. (p12)

“The war has ruined us for everything.”

… we were eighteen and had begun to love the life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. (p46)

We can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to be revenged. (p60)

We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill. (p61)

Once we had such desire – but they return not.

They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us. … they are a mysterious reflection, an apparition, that haunts us, that we fear and love without hope.

They are strong and our desire is strong – but they are unattainable, and we know it. (p64)

“You are at home, you are at home.” But a sense of strangeness will not leave me, I cannot feel at home amongst these things … – but I am not myself there. There is a distance, a veil between us. (p85)

A terrible feeling of foreignness suddenly rises up in me. I cannot find my way back, I am shut out through I entreat earnestly and put forth all my strength. ... I am a soldier, I must cling to that. (p91)

A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends. At some table a document is signed by some persons whom none of us knows, and then for years together ... [it] becomes our highest aim. But who can draw such a distinction when he looks at these quiet men with their childlike faces and apostles' beards. Any noncommissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, than they are to us.

... I am frightened; I dare think this way no more. This way lies the abyss. ... I will shut them away until the war is ended. ... this is the aim, the great, the sole aim, ... that I have looked for as the only possibility of existence after this annihilation of all human feelings ... (p102)

Trenches, hospitals, the common grave - there are no other possibilities. (p148)

What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school. (p149)

Summer of 1918 - Never was life in the line more bitter and full of horror than in the hours of the bombardment, when the blanched faces lie in the dirt and the hands clutch at the one thought: No! No! Not now! Not now at the last moment! (p149)

No, we are not related. No, we are not related.

Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, and turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst. All is as usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died.

Then I know nothing more. (p153)

Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. (p154)

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come. (p154)