James Jones Quotes

I'm really serious about this writing thing. What time I haven't been writing, I've been reading: Thomas Wolfe, if you know who he is. His writing is mostly built about the central character of a writer, himself. Altho it's fiction, it deals with his life and experiences. In my opinion, little as it's worth, he is the greatest writer that has lived, Shakespeare included. He is a genius.

I wasn't hit very badly — a piece of shrapnel went thru my helmet and cut a nice little hole in the back of my head. It didn't fracture the skull and is healed up nicely now. I don't know what happened to my helmet; the shell landed close to me and when I came to, the helmet was gone. The concussion together with the fragment that hit me must have broken the chinstrap and torn it off my head. It also blew my glasses off my face. I never saw them again, either, but I imagine they are smashed to hell. If I hadn't been lying in a hole I'd dug with my hands and helmet, that shell would probably have finished me off. The hole was only six or eight inches deep, but that makes an awful lot of difference, and it looked like a canyon.

History is always written from the viewpoints of the leaders. And increasingly, in our age, war leaders do not get shot at with any serious consistency. Leaders make momentous, world-encompassing historical decisions. It is your average anonymous soldier, or pilot, or naval gunnery rating who has to carry them out on the ground. Where there is often a vast difference between grandiose logic and plans and what takes place on the terrain. What it is that makes a man go out into dangerous places and get himself shot at with increasing consistency until finally he dies, is an interesting subject for speculation. And an interesting study. One might entitle it, THE EVOLUTION OF A SOLDIER.

I have discovered only two writers whom I can take all the way, or at least nearly so; and those are Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Wolfe. I think Hemingway is confused on lots of things, just as I think the Fountainhead was confused; but I also think both are magnificently right in many things.)

Sometimes the air is awfully clear here. You can look off to sea and see the soft, warm, raggedy roof of clouds stretching on and on and on. It almost seems as if you can look right on into eternity.

The two transports had sneaked up from the south in the first graying flush of dawn, their cumbersome mass cutting smoothly through the water whose still greater mass bore them silently, themselves s gray as the dawn which camouflaged them.

I want to make everybody in the world groan with the inevitability of sorrow.

It will say just about everything I have ever had to say, or will ever have to say, on the human condition of war and what it means to us, as against what we claim it means to us.

When he finished packing, he walked out on to the third-floor porch of the barracks brushing the dust from his hands, a very neat and deceptively slim young man in the summer khakis that were still early morning fresh.

I still think its probably the most evil of all pursuits. ... the thing is when you're getting shot at you don't think so much about who's right and who's wrong or who's good and who's and bad ... one of the first things they told you was "Forget about patriotism. That's not how you win a war. You win a war by being a vicious, merciless, mean, son-of-a-bitch." And, they try to infuse that in everybody, and I think rightly so.

I write to reach eternity.

Also by the way, I have found a title for this book. From Here to Eternity. Taken from the "Whiffenpoof" song, of Yale drinking fame. It goes: "We are little black sheep who have gone astray, baa . . . baa . . . baa. Gentlemen songsters out on a spree, damned from here to eternity. God have mercy on such as we. Baa, etc." Maybe it's maudlin, but so am I. I get chills every time I sing it, even when sober.

I'm going to ask you something. If I do get killed, and I honestly don't see how I can help it, I want you to write that book we were thinking about when I enlisted. If I get it, it's a cinch I won't be able to do it, and it would make me feel a whole lot better to know that if not my name and hand, at least, the thot of me would be passed on and not forgotten entirely. You know, sort of put into the book the promise that I had and the things I might have written so at least the knowledge of talent wasted won't be lost. . . If I get it, no one will ever know to what heights I might have gone as a writer. Maybe if you wrote about the promise that was there, all wouldn't be lost.

Humor itself is a kind strange thing in the first place, it's kind of a short-circuit in the brain around horror that saves us from having to face it totally.

This place is hell. They herd you around like cattle; they order you around like dogs; they work you like horses; and they feed you like hogs.