Arch of Triumph Quotes

“-Why does a man live?
-In order to think about it...”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“Ни один человек не может стать более чужим, чем тот, которого ты в прошлом любил...”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“Anything you can settle with money is cheap.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today— when it meant so little.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“I don’t want to get old.”
“You won’t get old. Life will pass over your face, that will be all, and it will become more beautiful. One is old only when one no longer feels.”
“No. When one no longer loves.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“The best way to lose a woman was to show her a kind of life that one could offer her for only a few days.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“I’ll tell you the story of the wave and the rock. It’s an old story. Older than we are. Listen. Once upon a time there was a wave who loved a rock in the sea, let us say in the Bay of Capri. The wave foamed and swirled around the rock, she kissed him day and night, she embraced him with her white arms, she sighed and wept and besought him to come to her. She loved him and stormed about him and in that way slowly undermined him, and one day he yielded, completely undermined, and sank into her arms.”
“And suddenly he was no longer a rock to be played with, to be loved, to be dreamed of. He was only a block of stone at the bottom of the sea, drowned in her. The wave felt disappointed and deceived and looked for another rock
“What does that mean? He should have remained a rock.”
“The wave always says that. But things that move are stronger than immovable things. Water is stronger than rocks.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“Love should not be polluted with friendship.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“Regret is the most useless thing in the world. One cannot recall anything. And one cannot rectify anything. Otherwise we would all be saints. Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“No one could become stranger than the person you once loved”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“One always expects something else.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“Am I jealous? he thought, astonished. Jealous of the chance object to which she has attached herself? Jealous of something that does not concern me? One can be jealous of a love that has turned away, but not of that to which it has turned.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“There was only the broad square with the scattered dim moons of the street lamps and with the monumental stone arch which receded into the mist as though it would prop up the melancholy sky and protect beneath itself the faint lonely flame on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which looked like the last grave of mankind in the midst of night and loneliness.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“When we love each other we are immortal and indestructible like the heartbeat and the rain and the wind.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“Още една жена, която не знае къде да отиде. Нощем не знаят къде да отидат, а сутрин изчезват преди да се събудиш. Тогава знаят къде да отидат. Познато, евтино отчаяние, което настъпва с нощта и изчезва с нея.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“(Ravic speaking of a butterfly caught in the Louvre) In the morning it would search for flowers and life and the light honey of blossoms and would not find them and later it would fall asleep on millennial marble, weakened by then, until the grip of the delicate, tenacious feet loosened and it fell, a thin leaf of premature autumn.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“She was very beautiful and he felt he loved her. She was not beautiful as a state or a picture is beautiful; she was beautiful as a meadow across which the wind blows. It was life that pulsed in her and that had formed her into what she was.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“A strange night, he thought. Somewhere now there is shooting and men are being hunted and imprisoned and tortured and murdered, some corner of a peaceful world is being trampled upon, and one knows it, helplessly, and life buzzes on in the bright bistros of the city, no one cares, and people go calmly to sleep, and I am sitting here with a woman between pale chrysanthemums and a bottle of calvados, and the shadow of love rises, trembling, lonesome, strange and sad, it too an exile from the safe gardens of the past, shy and wild and quick as if it had no right”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“Много силно ли? Какво можеше да е много силно? Само тишината. Тишината, в която човек чувства, че ще се пръсне....като в безвъздушно пространство. ”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“There is no guilt in feelings ever.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“Ljubav nije jezero u kome se uvek može ogledati... ona ima plimu i oseku i olupine i potonule gradove i bure i kovčege sa zlatom i bisere… ali biseri su duboko...”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph

“Don't ask about the consequences if you want to do something. Otherwise you'll never do it.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“There was always a screen behind which one could hide— a superior who in turn had his superior— orders, instructions, duties, commands— and finally the many-headed monster, morale, necessity, hard reality, responsibility, or whatever it was called— there was always a screen behind which to evade the simple law of humanity.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“To be alone—the eternal refrain of life. It wasn’t better or worse than anything else. One talked too much about it. One was always and never alone. A violin, suddenly—somewhere out of a twilight—in a garden on the hills around Budapest. The heavy scent of chestnuts. The wind. And dreams crouched on one’s shoulders like young owls, their eyes becoming lighter in the dusk. A night that never became night. The hour when all women were beautiful.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“Actually, what does man live for?”
“To think about it. Any other question?”
“Yes. Why does he die just when he has done that and has become a bit more sensible?” “Some people die without having become more sensible.”
“Don’t evade my question. And don’t start talking about the transmigration of souls.”
“I’ll ask you something else first. Lions kill antelopes; spiders flies; foxes chickens; which is the only race in the world that wars on itself uninterruptedly, fighting and killing one another?”
“Those are questions for children. The crown of creation, of course, the human being— who invented the words love, kindness, and mercy.” “Good. And who is the only being in Nature that is capable of committing suicide and does it?” “Again the human being— who invented eternity, God, and resurrection.”
“Excellent,” Ravic said. “You see of how many contradictions we consist. And you want to know why we die?”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“He looked around. The room, a few suitcases, some belongings, a handful of well-read books— a man needed few things to live. And it was good not to get used to many things when life was unsettled. Again and again one had to abandon them or they were taken away. One should be ready to leave every day. That was the reason he had lived alone— when one was on the move one should not have anything that could bind one. Nothing that could stir the heart. The adventure— but nothing more.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“The simplest and the most incredible thing in the world had come true again: two people speaking to each other, each for himself; and sounds, called words, shaped the same images and feelings in that palpitating mass behind the skull, and out of meaningless vibrations of the vocal chords and their unexplainable reactions in the viscous gray convolutions, skies suddenly grew again in which were mirrored clouds, brooks, past times, growth and decay and hard-won wisdom.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“What do you know about me? What do you know about love that comes into a life in which everything has become questionable? What is your cheap intoxication compared to that? When falling and falling suddenly changes, when the endless Why becomes the final You, when like a fata morgana above the desert of silence feeling suddenly arises, takes shape, and inexorably the delusion of the blood becomes a landscape compared with which all dreams are pale and commonplace? A landscape of silver, a city of filigree and rose quartz, shining like the bright reflection of blooming blood—what do you know about it? Do you think that one can talk about it so easily? That a glib tongue can quickly press it into a cliché of words or even of feelings? What do you know about graves that open and how one stands in dread of the many colorless empty nights of yesterday—yet they open and no skeletons now lie bleaching there, only earth is there, earth, fertile seeds, and already the first green. What do you know about that? You love the intoxication, the conquest, the Other You that wants to die in you and that will never die, you love the stormy deceit of the blood, but your heart will remain empty because one cannot keep anything that does not grow from within oneself. And not much can grow in a storm. It is in the empty nights of loneliness that it grows, if one does not despair. What do you know about it?”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

“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!”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country