Quotes from James Jones

War don't ennoble men, it turns 'em into dogs. It poisons the soul.

In spite of all of the training you get and the precautions you take to keep yourself alive, it's largely a matter of luck that decides whether or not you get killed.

Every man has a right to kill himself.

Love either starves to death and becomes a shadow, or else it dies young and remains a dream.

So a new element darkled in their already darkling mood: a somber, deep-rooted bitterness which would grow and grow until it would make of them—those who survived—the tough, mean, totally cynical infantry fighters which their leaders fondly on sentimental grounds already believed they were, and which all of them, everybody, hated the Japanese for being.

Billions of hard, bright stars shone with relentless glitter across the tropic night sky.

You think religions are constant things? inflexible and solid and form full-grown? Religions evolve. They grow out of a need, just like any other natural phenomenon, and they follow the same natural laws. They are born, grown, have sons, and illegitimate sons, and die.

One way, he thought, the whole thing of ring fighting was hurting somebody else, deliberately, and particularly when it was not necessary. Two men who have nothing against each other get in a ring and try to hurt each other, to provide vicarious fear for people with less guts than themselves. And to cover it up they called it sports and gambled on it. He had never looked at that way before, and if there was any single thing he could not endure it was to be a dupe.

All right, he thought, okay; if thats the way it is; a savagery of anger in him now at the picture. They call them pin-up girls and think its cute how our boys, now that they're drafted, love to hang them in their wall lockers. And then close up all the whorehouses, every place they can, so our young men will not be contaminated.

Never put things off…you will wake up and find them gone.

And it seemed to him then that every human was always looking for himself, in bars, in railway trains, in offices, in mirrors, in love, especially in love, for the self of him that is there, someplace, in every other human. Love was not to give oneself, but find oneself, describe oneself.

It did not last long. It is only in the movies that knife fighters stab and miss and slash and miss and tussle over several city blocks.

It was strange how closely we returnees clung together. We were like a family of orphaned children, split by an epidemic and sent to different care centers. That feeling of an epidemic disease persisted. The people treated us nicely, and cared for us tenderly, and then hurried to wash their hands after touching us. We were somehow unclean. We were tainted. And we ourselves accepted this. We felt it too ourselves. We understood why the civilian people preferred not to look at our injuries.

Old soldiers never die, they write novels.

Is it not also a paradox that in our efforts to escape pain we all run immediately for salvation to human love where we find the greatest pain of all?

I've owned a thousand houses that I've never built, she said. Never had the money to build. Couldn't have used if I had had the money. Never really wanted to build maybe. But I still own the houses.--Karen Holmes in From Here To Eternity

He had studied, and worked, and slaved, and eaten untold buckets of shit, to have this opportunity.

the quickest, efficient, least expensive way to educate a man is to make it painful for him when he is wrong, the same as with any other animal.

People ain't mathematics, Jim. If they was, you and Einstein would of fought it out a long time ago, to see who rules the world.

homosexuality is the direct result of chastity in women.

Some day...as you grow older, you will find imagination sometimes produces a truth that is greater than any fact.

The little red eyes glared at Prew challenging, almost hoping for some disagreement that would force Old Ike to prove his loyalty to Holmes, Wilson, the Company, and the cause, which might be Better Soldiering; Peacetime Preparedness; or the Perpetuation of An Aristocracy. Nobody could have named the Cause, but then its name was unimportant, as long as the Cause itself remained to levy loyalty.

But thats not love, he thought, thats not what she wants, nor what any of them want, they do not want you to find yourself in them, they want instead that you should lose yourself in them. And yet, he thought, they are always trying to find themselves in you.

legal procedure has always tacitly been concerned with human relations, rather than abstract justice, and that consequently in spite of the legal codes it is really the human relations underneath that determine the verdicts in the courts.