We march up, moody or good-tempered soldiers – we reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals.
Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying – a little shove toward the end.
Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.
We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.
Anything you can settle with money is cheap.
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.
But probably that’s the way of the world – when we have finally learned something we’re too old to apply it – and so it goes, wave after wave, generation after generation. No one learns anything at all from anyone else.
To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There’s much too little forgetting.
No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.
The war has ruined us for everything.
Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today – when it meant so little.
The things men did or felt they had to do.
Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.
Sometimes I used to think that one day i should wake up, and all that had been would be over. forgotten, sunk, drowned. Nothing was sure – not even memory.
We want to live at any price; so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings which, though they might be ornamental enough in peace-time, would be out of place here.
We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.
Mirrors are there when we are and yet they never give anything back to us but our own image. Never, never shall we know what they are when they are alone or what is behind them.
Heaven Has No Favorites.
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.
I felt the first soft glow of intoxication that makes the blood warmer and spreads an illusion of adventure over uncertainty.