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23 quotes
German-born novelist (1898–1970)
“Love should not be polluted with friendship.”
"To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting."
on Life
"...and without love, one is a dead man on furlough, nothing but a scrap of paper with a few dates and a chance name on it, and we as well die."
on Love
"A hospital alone shows what war is."
on War
"A man dreams of a miracle and wakes up to loaves of bread."
on Dreams
"No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck."
on Death
"You can deceive yourself with truth too. That's an even more dangerous dream."
on Truth
"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."
on Mental Health
"When we love each other we are immortal and indestructible like the heartbeat and the rain and the wind."
"We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad."
"That is the remarkable thing about drinking: it brings people together so quickly, but between night and morning it sets an interval again of years."
"What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!"
"Our knowledge of life is limited to death"
"My healthy blood was powerless to cure the sick blood of my beloved. That was beyond understanding. And so is death."
"We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost."
on Philosophy
"We don't act like that because we are in good humor we are in a good humor because otherwise we should go to pieces."
on Emotion
"It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for."
"One lost easiest what one held in one’s arms— never what one left."
"There had never been any more between us thanchance had brought. But perhaps that makes a greater indebtednessand binds closer than much else"
on Relationships
"Petnaest srećnih godina su kratke - odgovorih. Petnaest nesrećnih godina su duge i pružaju čoveku mnogo iskustva."
"The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces."
