Love is not a businessman who wants to see a return on his investments. And imagination needs only a few nails on which to hang its veil. Whether they are of gold, tin, or covered with rust makes no difference to it. Wherever it gets caught, it is caught. Thornbush or rosebush, as soon as the veil of moonlight and mother-of-pearl has fallen on it, either becomes a fairy tale out of A Thousand and One Nights.
See what has become of us. As far as I know, only the old Greeks had gods of drinking and the joy of life: Bacchus and Dionysus. Instead of that we have Freud, inferiority complexes and the psychoanalysis. We’re afraid of the too great words in love and not afraid of much too great words in politics. A sorry generation!
Home – what other home existed for one who belonged nowhere, but the stormy one in the heart of another for a short time? Was not this the reason why love, when it struck the hearts of the homeless, shook and possessed them so completely – because they had nothing else? Had he not for this very reason tried to avoid it? And had it not followed him and overtaken him and struck him down? It was harder to rise again on the slippery ice of a foreign land than on familiar and accustomed ground.
I tell you this: it is the most despicable thing of all to drag animals into a war.
There is no guilt in feelings ever.
Sweet words. Gentle deceptive balm. Help, love, to belong together, to come back again – words, sweet words. Nothing but words. How many words existed for this simple, wild, cruel attraction of two bodies! What a rainbow of imagination, lies, sentiment, and self-deception enclosed it!
An hour passes. I sit tensely and watch his every movement in case he may perhaps say something. What if he were to open his mouth and cry out! But he only weeps, his head turned aside. He does not speak of his mother or his brothers and sisters. He says nothing; all that lies behind him; he is entirely alone now with his little life of nineteen years, and cries because it leaves him.
By day Lisbon has a naive theatrical quality that enchants and captivates, but by night it is a fairy-tale city, descending over lighted terraces to the sea, like a woman in festive garments going down to meet her dark lover.
Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk.
That is a generation’s difference these days,” Ferdinand continued. “A lifetime’s difference. A thousand years’ difference. What do you children understand of existence? You’re afraid even of your own feelings. You don’t write letters – you telephone; you don’t dream – you go for week-end excursions; you are rational in love and irrational in politics – a pitiable race.
Don’t ask about the consequences if you want to do something. Otherwise you’ll never do it.
Love, he thought. That too is love. The old miracle. It not only casts a rainbow of dreams against the gray sky of facts – it also sheds romantic light upon a heap of dung – a miracle and a mad mockery. Suddenly he had the strange feeling of having become, in a remote way, an accomplice.
The soldier is on friendlier terms than other men with his stomach and intestines. Three-quarters of his vocabulary is derived from these regions, and they give an intimate flavor to expressions of his greatest joy as well as of his deepest indignation. It is impossible to express oneself in any other way so clearly and pithily.
We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.
Bertinck has a chest wound. After a while a fragment smashes away his chin, and the same fragment has sufficient force to tear open Leer’s hip. Leer groans as he supports himself on his arm, he bleeds quickly, no one can help him. Like an emptying tube, after a couple of minutes he collapses. What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school.
Those are for us,’ growls Detering. ‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ Kat snaps back at him. ‘You’ll be lucky to get a coffin at all,’ grins Tjaden, ’they’ll just use a tarpaulin to wrap up that target-practice dummy you call a body, you wait and see.
Beyond this our life did not extend. And of this nothing remains.
We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts.
Why – the question on which all logic, all philosophy, all science has shattered up to now.
Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what can possibly become of us?