[b]Erich Maria Remarque
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.[/b]
Okay, but how exaggerated?
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 escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.
I knew a few of them. And a few of them knew me.
Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.
Unless your life is a novel.
To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There’s much too little forgetting.
On the other hand, tell that to your brain.
No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.
Depending on, among other things, the credulity of your audience.
We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.
He knew that he was.