One way, he thought, the whole thing of ring fighting was hurting somebody else, deliberately, and particularly when it was not necessary. Two men who have nothing against each other get in a ring and try to hurt each other, to provide vicarious fear for people with fewer guts than themselves. And to cover it up they called it sports and gambled on it. He had never looked at that way before, and if there was any single thing he could not endure it was to be a dupe.

— James Jones

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 rain barrel, shared the excitement and the coziness of the buzzing insects that had sought refuge on the porch, and now and then he slapped detached 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 somewhere out beyond the wall of water humanity still existed, and was preparing supper.

— James Jones

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

— James Jones

The boy Predict 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

The little bit you and me might change the world," Malloy smiled, "it wouldn't show up until a hundred years after we were dead. We'd never see it."" But it'd be there.

— James Jones

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

— James Jones

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 have a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.

— James Jones

...the quickest, efficient, the 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

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 little.

— James Jones

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.

— James Jones