Character: Paul Baumer

- Perhaps so, but after all, they just wanted her to be.

And I know: everything that settles like a stone in our souls now, while we are at war, will emerge in them later, after the war, and then a big conversation about these things will begin, on which it will depend on whether we will live on or not live.

We want to live, to live at all costs; we cannot burden ourselves with feelings that may adorn a person in peacetime, but are completely inappropriate and false here.

We are always too late to see clearly.

- ...it was worth it to become a non-commissioned officer, as he turned into the butcher. How does it work?
- Yes, and not only Himmelstoss, it happens to so many. How to get stripe or a sword, so just be very different people, as if the concrete got drunk.
- It's all in the uniform...

The front seems to me a sinister maelstrom. Still far away from the centre, in calm waters already begin to feel the force with which he draws you into his funnel, slowly, inexorably, almost completely paralyzing all resistance.
But from the ground, from the air we join forces, we need to defend ourselves, especially from the ground. For anyone in the light of the earth doesn't mean so much as to the soldier. In those moments when he nestles up to her, long and clasping her in his arms, when under fire, fear of death makes him deeply buried in her face and all her body, she's his only friend, his brother, his mother. Her silent reliable intercessor, moaning and screaming, he confides his fear and his pain, and she takes them again and releases him for ten seconds, ten seconds, dashes, another ten seconds of life - and again pick him up, to conceal, sometimes forever.
Earth, earth, earth!..
Earth! You have folds, and hollows, and the hollows in which we can hide run and hide like a mole! Earth! When we writhed in its death agony, under the bursts carrying the destruction of the fire, under the chilling howl of explosions, you once again gave us life, poured it in us a powerful counter-jet! The crazed confusion of living beings, which was nearly ripped to shreds, it was passed on to you, and we felt in our hands your return currents and clung even tighter to you with my fingers, and silently, fearfully enjoying another experienced the minute I bit into you, lips!

When I saw so many dead, so much pain because one has really can not understand.
(When a man has seen so much death, it is not easy to understand how you can grieve about the same things.)

We are soldiers, and then, surprising and shameful way, and even people.

We will not allow ourselves to break, we have adapted; this helped our twenty years, which more was so difficult. But the most important thing is that we woke up strong, always ready to spring into action the sense of mutual cohesion, and subsequently, when we got to the front, it transformed into the only good thing that spawned the war in the partnership!

I don't know if I overcame what I had experienced. But while I'm alive, life finds its way, wants or doesn't want something living in me and called "I".

This silence is the reason that the patterns of the past evoke not so much desires as sadness, immeasurable, unwise longing. It was, but won't be back. It's gone now, a different world, which for us turned out. In the barracks, these images of the past made us violent gusts of rebellious desires. When we were linked with him, we belonged to him, it belonged to us, even though we were separated.. These images came up on the sounds of soldiers ' songs which we sang, going in the morning meadow on drill exercises; to the right is the scarlet glow of dawn, left - black silhouettes of the forest; at that time they were sharp, distinct memory that still lived in us and did not come from outside but from ourselves.
But here, in the trenches, we lost it. It was no longer awakened in us we are dead, and it moved off into the distance, it was the mysterious gleam of something forgotten, a vision that sometimes appears in front of us; we fear him and love his hopeless love. Vision of the past is strong, and our nostalgia is also strong, but it is unattainable, and we know it. Remember it as hopeless as to expect that you'll be a General.
And even if we were allowed to go back to those places where we spent our youth, we probably wouldn't know what to do. Those clandestine forces, which are barely perceptible currents flowed from them to us, it is impossible to resurrect. Around us were the same species, we would have wandered to the same places; we would know them and was touched by seeing them again. But we would have experienced the very same feeling, thinking about a photograph of a dead comrade: it's his features, his face, and endured with him the days become in the memory of the deceptive appearance of this life, but all=the same it is not he himself.

Sway of the machine, monotone sound shouts, monotonous rain. The water fell on our heads and on the heads of those killed on the front, on the body of little recruit, and on his wound that is too large for his hips, she poured on the grave of Cimmeria, it pours into our hearts.
Somewhere hit by a shell. We shudder, eyes alert, hands ready to throw the body over the side of the car in a roadside ditch.
But nothing more is heard. Only from time to time, monotonous cries of "caution - wire." We squat - we are again on the alert.

When man is alone, he begins to look at nature and to love her.

Katczinsky says that it is all from education, it, like, people get stupid.