All Quiet on the Western Front

by Erich Maria Remarque

Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk.

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.

A hospital alone shows what war is.

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow.