Then we change our possy and lie down again to play cards. We know how to do that: to play cards, to swear, and to fight. Not much for twenty years;--and yet too much for twenty years.

Not everyone’s life is like a house that belongs to him and that he can go on decorating ever more richly with the furniture of his memory. Some people live in hotels, in many hotels. The years close behind them like hotel doors— and the only thing that remains is a little courage and no regrets.

A neat little apartment with a neat little bourgeois life. A neat little security on the edge of the abyss. Do you really see that?

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

The things men did or felt they had to do.

To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and again and often forever.