Erich Remark Quotes

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.

Aber hatte er den Menschen, den er liebte, nicht tiefer besessen als die Galerie der stupiden Sieger? Und was besitzen wir wirklich? Wozu soviel «Lärm um Dinge, die als bestes nur geliehen sind für einige Zeit; und wozu soviel Gerede darüber, ob man sie mehr oder minder besitzt, wenn das trügerische Wort „besitzen" doch nur heißt: die Luft zu umarmen?

Das Wunder, wenn man es erlebt, ist nie vollkommen, erst die Erinnerung macht es dazu.

Close behind us were our friends: Tjaden, a skinny locksmith of our own age, the biggest eater of the company. He sits down to eat as thin as a grasshopper and gets up as big as a bug in the family way; Haie Westhus, of the same age, a peat-digger, who can easily hold a ration-loaf in his hand and say: Guess what I've got in my fist; then Detering, a peasant, who thinks of nothing but his farm-yard and his wife; and finally Stanislaus Katczinsky, the leader of our group, shrewd, cunning, and hard-bitten, forty years of age, with a face of the soil, blue eyes, bent shoulders, and a remarkable nose for dirty weather, good food, and soft jobs.

While the managers are right as far as the work methods they offer are concerned, experience has shown—and has convinced not a few managers—that if the workers can be truly active, responsible, and knowledgeable in their work role, the formerly uninterested ones change considerably and show a remarkable degree of inventiveness, activity, imagination, and satisfaction.

(We live, as the literary philosopher Erich Heller remarked, in an ‘age of prose’.)

Furthermore, we automatically deduce that people who don’t conform must be mentally ill. The homeless man who refuses to live as normal folk do is suffering some psychiatric malady. But imagine for instance a world of anarchy where law and order has broken down. In that world the mentally ill would be considered normal. Thus it can be assumed that mental illness is a derivative of an economic functioning world. “The fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.” - Erich Fromm.

The effort made to suppress sex would be difficult to understand if it were for the sake of sex as such. Not sex, however, but the breaking of human will is the reason for vilifying sex. A great number of the so-called primitive societies have no sex taboo whatever. Since they function without exploitation and domination, they do not have to break the individual’s will. They can afford not to stigmatize sex and to enjoy the pleasure of sexual relations without guilt feelings. Most remarkable in these societies is that this sexual freedom does not lead to sexual greed; that after a period of relatively transient sexual relations couples find each other; that they then have no desire to swap partners, but are also free to separate when love has gone. For these not-property-oriented groups sexual enjoyment is an expression of being, not the result of sexual possessiveness.