"Ah! Mother, Mother! You still think I am a child - why can I not put my head in your lap and weep?" dark, musty platoon huts, with the iron bedsteads, the chequered bedding, the lockers and the stools! Even you can become the object of desire." "Our being, almost utterly carried away by the fury of the storm, streams back through our hands from thee, and we, thy redeemed ones, bury ourselves in thee, and through the long minutes in a mute agony of hope bite into thee with our lips!" "I don't know whether it is morning or evening, I lie in the pale cradle of the twilight, and listen for soft words which will come, soft and near - am I crying?" "Immediately a second is beside him, a black insect is caught between them and tries to escape - the airman." "When Kat stands in front of the hut and says: 'There'll be a bombardment,' that is merely his own opinion but if he says it here, then the sentence has the sharpness of a bayonet in the moonlight, it cuts clean through the thought, it thrusts nearer and speaks to this unknown thing that is awakened in us, a dark meaning - 'There'll be a bombardment.'" "Like a big, soft jelly-fish, floats into our shell-hole and lolls there obscenely." "No longer do we lie helpless, waiting on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to be revenged." "The wood vanishes, it is pounded, crushed, torn to pieces." "My feet begin to move forward in my boots, I go quicker, I run." "It is as though formerly we were coins of different provinces and now we are melted down, and all bear the same stamp." "A man dreams of a miracle and wakes up to loaves of bread." "Dawn approaches without anything happening - only the everlasting, nerve-wracking roll behind the enemy lines, trains, trains, lorries, lorries but what are they concentrating?" "I recognize the characteristic outline of the Dolbenberg, a jagged comb, springing up precipitously from the limits of the forests." "The front is a cage in which we must await fearfully whatever may happen." 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 often forever." "To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. "All at once he remembers his school days and finishes hastily: 'He wants to leave the room, sister.'" "At the same time he ventilates his backside." "Darknesses blacker than the night rush on us with giant strides, over us and away." "The wind plays with our hair it plays with our words and thoughts." "My arms have grown wings and I'm almost afraid of going up into the sky, as though I held a couple of captive balloons in my fists." "Then steams off with Himmelstoss in his wake." Passages illustrating these rhetorical devices are listed in the following sections. Remarque demonstrates a mastery of language, which he manipulates to suit rapid shifts of tone, characterization, and theme, depending on his varying needs for graphic, blunt description, lyricism, dialogue, or lament.
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