Erich Maria Remarque

side comforts—the luggage carrier,

Tomorrow or the day after I'd throw myself into the struggle for a livelihood, the daily round of parry and thrust, of deceptions and half-lies, but tonight the city held out its impartial face to me like a monstrance, every feature etched in the finest filigree. It had not yet caught me up in its net, but confronted me as equal to equal. Time seemed to stand still, as though for this one moment in the darkness the great scales were evenly balanced between active and passive.

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."

editorials were abominable, packed with bloodthirsty, arrogant lies. The whole outside world was represented as degenerate, treacherous, stupid, and good for nothing else but to be taken over by Germany.

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.