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Edita's Reviews > Three Comrades
Three Comrades
by
by
Edita's review
bookshelves: my-favourite-books, lost-generation, erich-maria-remarque
Jun 24, 2011
bookshelves: my-favourite-books, lost-generation, erich-maria-remarque
Read 5 times. Last read September 6, 2020 to September 20, 2020.
I jumped up, so unreal, so much as if out of another world did this picture appear to me now—the wide, blue sky, the white lines of foam, and the lovely slender figure against it—as if I alone were in the world and out of the water came stepping the first woman. For one instant I felt the immense, quiet power of beauty, and knew that it was stronger than all the bloodstained past; that it must be stronger, else the world would collapse, sink down and perish in its own chaos. And more even than that I felt that I was there, simply there, and that Pat was there, that I lived, that I had escaped the horror, that I had eyes and hands and thoughts and hot pulsing blood, and that all that was a miracle beyond comprehension.
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Reading Progress
Finished Reading
Finished Reading
Finished Reading
May 5, 1991
–
Started Reading
May 9, 1991
–
Finished Reading
June 24, 2011
– Shelved
July 15, 2011
– Shelved as:
my-favourite-books
August 9, 2014
– Shelved as:
lost-generation
February 21, 2015
– Shelved as:
erich-maria-remarque
September 6, 2020
–
Started Reading
September 6, 2020
–
2.22%
"But it was better not to think too much about all that—when alone, at any rate; and especially at night. For every now and then things had a way of rising up suddenly out of the past and staring at one with dead eyes."
page
11
September 6, 2020
–
3.43%
"The evening was beautiful and calm. The troughs of the furrows in the new-ploughed fields glowed purple; the ridges were brown and burning gold. Great clouds, like flamingoes, floated in the apple-green sky, and slender in the midst of them lay the sickle of the waxing moon. Distressfully bare still, yet full of the promise of bud, a hazel bough held the evening and dream in its arms."
page
17
September 6, 2020
–
5.04%
"Keep things at arm's length, Köster used to say. If you let anything come too near you want to hold on to it. And there is nothing a man can hold on to."
page
25
September 8, 2020
–
13.71%
""We live only on, illusions and credits." [...] "On illusions out of the past, and credits on the future.""
page
68
September 10, 2020
–
16.94%
"I felt extraordinary. It was not like other nights when one had been crazy about some girl. There was tenderness in it. Tenderness, and the desire to be able for once to let go."
page
84
September 11, 2020
–
19.35%
"She made no complaints against life and knew that one must make the best of it if one is to get even a little bit of what is called happiness. She knew too that one must pay for it twice and three times over. Happiness is the most uncertain thing in the world and has the highest price."
page
96
September 11, 2020
–
23.99%
"And I? I saw her before me, beautiful, young, expectant, a butterfly that by a happy accident had flown into my down-at-heels, shabby room, into my insignificant, meaningless life, with me and yet not with me—a breath merely, and it might rise and fly away again. . . . Blame me, condemn me; I couldn't, I simply could not say No, could not say that I had never been there; not yet. . . ."
page
119
September 11, 2020
–
26.61%
"One is sad when one thinks about life—cynical when one -sees what people make of it."
page
132
September 11, 2020
–
28.83%
"I did not want to think so much about her. I wanted to take her as an unexpected, delightful gift, that had come and would go again—nothing more. I meant not to give room to the thought that it could ever be more. I knew too well that all love has the desire for eternity and that therein lies its eternal torment. Nothing lasts. Nothing."
page
143
September 12, 2020
–
34.27%
"It was the melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them; that love begins with a human being but does not end in him; and that everything can be there: a human being, love, happiness, life—and that yet in some terrible way it is always too little, and grows ever less the more it seems."
page
170
September 13, 2020
–
40.32%
"And more even than that I felt that I was there, simply there, and that Pat was there, that I lived, that I had escaped the horror, that I had eyes and hands and thoughts and hot pulsing blood, and that all that was a miracle beyond comprehension."
page
200
September 15, 2020
–
44.35%
"Submit! thought I. A lot that would help. Fight, fight, was the only thing in this struggle, where one would go under in the end anyway. Fight for the little that one loved. At seventy one might begin to think about submitting."
page
220
September 18, 2020
–
46.17%
"I let her be and said no more. There was no point in trying to divert her. She would have to face it, and it was as well it should happen now, while I was still there. One could only postpone it with words; sooner or later it was bound to come, and then perhaps it would only be harder."
page
229
September 18, 2020
–
56.05%
"[...] and then I thought of Pat and suddenly had the feeling that the gulf could never be bridged. The leap was too wide, life had become too dirty for happiness, it couldn't last, one didn't believe in it any more; this was only a breathing space, not a harbour."
page
278
September 19, 2020
–
63.71%
"So long as a man doesn't give in, he is still more than his fate."
page
316
September 20, 2020
–
68.55%
"[...] but I could not help myself—summer was all at once there; wind, sunset over the fields of corn, and the green light of the woodland path."
page
340
September 20, 2020
–
77.62%
"We remained sitting side by side in silence. What could we say? We had both seen too much to be able to do anything in the comforting line."
page
385
September 20, 2020
–
Finished Reading
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by
Edita
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rated it 5 stars
Sep 18, 2020 09:18PM
Damn it all, breathing space or no breathing space, harbour or no harbour, be they sundered so far that they will never be bridged, never be believed—for that very reason, because one could not believe it, for that reason was if always so bewilderingly new and overwhelming—happiness.
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