James Jones

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

Of all the things I dislike, I hate women worst.

...homosexuality is the direct result of chastity in women.

Did you ever hear the one about how every living woman dies three times? Once when she is seduced of her virginity, once when she is seduced of her freedom (I believe they call it marriage), and once when she is seduced of her husband.

It takes courage to stand for what you believe in.

He could not blame the Army, Angelo could blame the Army; Angelo hated the Army. But he didnt hate the Army, not even now. He remembered what Maureen had told him once that it was the system that was at fault. But he could not even blame the system, because the system was not anything, it was only a kind of accumulation of everybody, and you could not blame everybody, not unless you wanted the blame to become diluted into a meaningless term, a just nothing. Besides, this system here in this country was the best system the world had ever produced, wasnt it? This system was by far and above the best system anywhere else in the world today. He felt if he did not find somebody to blame pretty soon he would hate everybody.

Fife... simply walked off by himself, into the jungle to look at all the things which would continue to exist after he had ceased to. There were a lot of them. Fife looked at them all. They remained singularly unchanged by his scrutiny.

As they prepared themselves to go ashore no one doubted in theory that at least a certain percentage of them would remain on the island dead, once they set foot on it. But no one expected to be one of these. Still it was an awesome thought and as the first contingents came struggling up on deck in full gear to form up, all eyes instinctively sought out immediately this island where they were to be put, and left, and which might possibly turn out to be a friend's grave.

I like it too," Angelo said. "I love this country. Much you and anybody, and you know it.""I know it," Prew said."But I still hate this country. You love the Army. But I dont love the Army. This country's Army is why I hate this country. What did this country ever do for me? Gimme a right to vote for men I cant elect? You can have it. Gimme a right to work at a job I hate? You can have that too. Then tell I'm a Citizen of the greatest richest country on earth, if I dont believe it look at Park Avenue. Carnival prizes. All carnival prizes. [..] They shouldnt teach their immigrants' kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little bit of it, it ony makes for trouble. Me and the United States is dissociating our alliance as of right now, until the United States can find time to read its own textbooks a li

They shouldnt teach their immigrants' kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little bit of it, it ony makes for trouble. Me and the United States is dissociating our alliance as of right now, until the United States can find time to read its own textbooks a little.

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.

...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.

Up until then it had only been himself. Up to then it had been a private wrestle between him and himself. Nobody else much entered into it. After the people came into it he was, of course, a different man. Everything had changed then and he was no longer the virgin, with the virgin's right to insist upon platonic love. Life, in time, takes every maidenhead, even if it has to dry it up; it does not matter how the owner wants to keep it. Up to then he had been the young idealist. But he could not stay there. Not after the other people entered into it.

Sitting on the porch alone, listening to them fixing supper, he felt again the indignation he had felt before, the sense of loss and the aloneness, the utter defenselessness that was each man's lot, sealed up in his bee cell from all the others in the world. But the smelling of boiling vegetables and pork reached him from the inside, the aloneness left him for a while. The warm moist smell promised other people lived and were preparing supper.He listened to the pouring and the thunder rumblings that sounded hollow like they were in a rainbarrel, shared the excitement and the coziness of the buzzing insects that had sought refuge on the porch, and now and then he slapped detachedly at the mosquitoes, making a sharp crack in the pouring buzzing silence. The porch sheltered him from all but the splashes of the drops that hit the floor and their spray touched him with a pleasant chill. And he was secure, because someewhere out beyond the wall of water humanity still existed, and was preparing supper.

The main trouble with being an honest man was that it lost you all your illusions.