Erich Maria Remarque

Maybe the fall has hit me harder than you. In the fall all pacts are suspended. In the fall people only want ... What do we want in the fall?"
"Love," I said.

"It's fall," she said, with one of her abrupt changes of mood. "It's a hard season to live through even without being alone."

Tjaden and Muller have dug out a couple of washing bowls from somewhere and got him to fill them up to the brim as a reserve supply.

Until then I had only been aware of my loss—it had never occurred to me that I might have gained something by it.

I stick to myself. When I'm hungry on the water front, I compare myself with an imaginary me, who, in addition to being hungry, has cancer. That makes me happy for a minute, because I'm only hungry, without the cancer."

"It's we ourselves who make things important."

My reserves had been used up; my naked instinct of self-preservation had not been strong enough to endure the chill of loneliness any longer. I had not been able to build up a new life. In my heart I had never really wanted to, because I had never really put my old life behind me. I couldn't forget it, and I couldn't overcome it.

The self of those years had committed suicide when I crossed the border.

"That's it!" said Schwarz eagerly. "If we only knew it for suicide! Then we'd also be able to rise from the dead. We'd have several lives instead of dragging the ulcers of experience from one crisis to the next and succumbing to them in the end.

If this idea of spiritual suicide, which now seemed almost joyful, was to have any meaning, it had to be complete; it had to take in not only the years of exile, but also the years before it; otherwise a second gangrene, even older than the first, would set in.