James Jones Quotations

He knew how to handle pain. You had to lie down with pain, not draw back away from it. You let yourself sort of move around the outside edge of pain like with cold water until you finally got up your nerve to take yourself in hand. Then you took a deep breath and dove in and let yourself sink down it clear to the bottom. And after you had been down inside pain a while you found that like with cold water it was not nearly as cold as you had thought it was when your muscles were cringing themselves away from the outside edge of it as you moved around it trying to get up your nerve. He knew pain.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I don't think we shot the ball particularly well in our back court. We struggled making shots. I thought they did a better job defensively against us, and we did a poor job defensively against them.

I think that they shoot the ball very well from outside. Their biggest problem is they lost their center and they haven't replaced him with someone scoring under the basket and running the team on the offensive end. If you don't come to play and defend them, they're able to make shots.

I think that when you play a team a second time, and the first time you play them you destroy them, your psyche isn't in the right place. We all knew that this game wouldn't be easy, and that we would have to play harder than we did in the first game, but we didn't do that.

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.