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.

— James Jones

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

— James Jones

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

— James Jones

I like it too," Angelo said. "I love this country. Much you and anybody, and you know it."" I know it," Crew said." But I still hate this country. You love the Army. But I don't love the Army. This country's Army is why I hate this country. What did this country ever do for me? Give me a right to vote for men I can't elect? You can have it. Give me 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 don't believe it looks at Park Avenue. Carnival prizes. All carnival prizes. [.] They shouldn't teach their immigrants' kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little bit of it, it on makes for trouble. I 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

— James Jones

In spite of all the training you get and the precautions you take to keep yourself alive it's largely a matter of luck that decides whether you get killed.

— James Jones

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

It takes courage to stand for what you believe in.

— James Jones

I write to reach eternity

— James Jones

...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

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

— James Jones