James Jones > Quotes

“This great evil, where's it come from? How'd it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who's doing this? Who's killing us, robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we might've known? Does our ruin benefit the earth, does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?”
― James Jones, The thin red line

“Is it really worth it to die, to be dead, just to prove to everybody that you're not a coward?”
― James Jones, The thin red line

“It was almost funny, how even lying here terrified and half-expecting to be dead at any moment, his bureaucratic fear of reprimand, of public embarrassment was stronger than his physical fear of dying.”
― James Jones, The thin red line

“Their minds had balked. And when the mind balked like that, the reality became more dreamlike than the nightmare.”
― James Jones, The Thin Red Line

“The first note was clear and absolutely certain. There was no question or stumbling in this bugle. It swept across the quadrangle positively, held just a fraction longer than most buglers hold it. Held long like the length of time, stretching away from weary day to weary day. Held long like thirty years.”
― James Jones, From Here to Eternity

“Doll had learned something during the past six months of his life. Chiefly what he had learned was that everybody lived by a selected fiction. Nobody was really what he pretended to be. It was as if everybody made up a fiction story about himself, and then he just pretended to everybody that that was what he was. And everybody believed him, or at least accepted his fiction story. Doll did not know if everybody learned this about life when they reached a certain age, but he suspected that they did. They just didn't tell it to anybody. And rightly so. Obviously, if they told anybody, then their own fiction story about themselves wouldn't be true either. So everybody had to learn it for himself. And then, of course, pretend he hadn't learned it”
― James Jones, The Thin Red Line

“So much to spew out. They just keep coming, one after another. You're in a box ... a moving box. They want you dead, or in their lie.”
― James Jones

“Warden wore his comparatively new tan suit of Forstmann tropical worsted with the saddle-stitched lapels that had cost him $120 tourist prices, and that he saved for great occasions. But all the way into town he was furious with himself for coming. His hand hurt him and was swollen fatly and that also was her fault. He wished furiously he had stayed with Pete and the guys, forgetting how miserable he had been with them. He wished furiously he had left her and the rest of these middle-class society women to the gigolos who were neurotic enough themselves to be able to understand them. He wished furiously a lot of things. Once he even wished furiously he was dead and in hell. He knew then that he was in love.

- From Here to Eternity ; James Jones.”
― James Jones

“Warden had a theory about women: For years he had been asking them to sleep with him, the ones that interested him. "Will you go to bed with me?" and they were always shocked, even the rummy barflies. Of course, they always did, but that was only later, after he had fulfilled the proper requirements of approach. No woman ever said, "Why, yes, I'd like to go to bed with you." They couldn't do it. It wasnt in them to be that honest.”
― James Jones

“Dana had Society, Respectability, Tradition, Moral judgment, Time, Security (especially Security), and the generations of cuckolded husbands who had provided him with lessons in how to win by employing patience. Dana Holmes could afford to laugh at Milt Warden who had the audacity to try to defeat this array of heavy artillery with the popgun of Love. Because could you just point out to me once, please, sir, one single time that Love had ever bought anything? In these United States of the United Middle Class of Solid-Fronted United Greater America?”
― James Jones, From here to eternity: de volledige en ongecensureerde editie

“Is it really worth it to die, to be dead, just to prove to everybody that you’re not a coward?”
― James Jones

“Waste is any human activity which absorbs resources but creates no value”
― James P. Womak and Daniel T. Jones