James Jones Quotes

#1. Having a little talent as a writer is like having a little talent as a brain surgeon.

James Jones

#2. I don't think people like to read about themselves or about others as they really are. It would be too horrifying.

James Jones

#3. 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.

James Jones

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

James Jones

#5. He had not the makings of that honest man to whom success comes naturally.

James Jones

#6. That was one of the virtues of being a pessimist: nothing was ever as bad as you thought it would be.

James Jones

#7. Being in love made you especially vulnerable.

James Jones

#8. If I never meet you
In this life
Let me feel the lack
A glance from your eyes
Then my life
Will be yours

James Jones

#9. You see, as I go along, I've come to consider bravery as just about the most pernicious of virtues. Bravery is a horrible thing. The human race has it left over from the animal world and we can't get rid of it.

James Jones

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

James Jones

#11. 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.

James Jones

#12. I write to reach eternity

James Jones

#13. 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.

James Jones

#14. 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.

James Jones

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

James Jones

#16. 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.

James Jones

#17. All Welsh knew was that he was scared shitless, and at the same time was afflicted with a choking gorge of anger that any social coercion existed in the world which could force him to be here.

James Jones

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

James Jones

#19. 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.

James Jones

#20. Two whores who finally found something to mother. A guy could write a book about it, he thought bitterly, call it From Hair To Maternity. It would probly be a very long book. Whores did not produce as fast as rabbits.

James Jones

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

James Jones

#22. Homosexuality is the direct result of chastity in women.

James Jones

#23. I think that a classic style in writing tends to remove the reader one level from the immediacy of the experience. For any normal reader, I think a colloquial style makes him feel more as though he is within the action, instead of just reading about it.

James Jones

#24. 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.

James Jones

#25. Every man has a right to kill himself.

James Jones

#26. A man loves a thing. That don't mean it's gotta love him back.

James Jones

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

James Jones

#28. It takes courage to stand for what you believe in.

James Jones

#29. 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

James Jones

#30. The little bit you and me might change the world," Malloy smiled, "it wouldnt show up until a hundred years after we were dead. We'd never see it."
"But it'd be there.

James Jones

#31. 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?

James Jones

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

James Jones

#33. Weary looked at him and shook his head and put the tailgate up and drove down the gravel towards the bivouac, carrying two drunks, who both fatuously imagined, that once in a dream somewhere, sometime, someplace, they had managed for a moment to touch another human soul and understand it.

James Jones

#34. 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.

James Jones

#35. How about when I get to work, I have a new chair at my desk with a note attached saying," Your new chair, if you break it you buy the next one." AHMM no an email will be going out saying "If it breaks, replace it with the old one, there was nothing wrong with it.

James Jones

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

James Jones

#37. Old soldiers never die, they write novels.

James Jones

#38. I'm an American, and always will be. I happen to love that big, awkward, sprawling country very much - and its big, awkward, sprawling people.

James Jones

#39. Maybe he was a good man once, this old one, my predecessor, but they had worn him down, in thirty years, like a big knife made thin and fragile, needlelike, from constant honings. All that good steel just rubbed away no one knew where.

James Jones

#40. 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.

James Jones

#41. The boy Prewitt loved the songs because they gave him something, a first hint that pain might not be pointless if you could only turn it into something.

James Jones

#42. The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.

James Jones