James Jones

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

"Prew bit his lips. He got his envelope roll out of the wall locker and the combat pack off the bed foot. He laid them on the floor and opened the light pack. Everyone in the squadroom sat up and watched him silently and speculatively, as they might watch a sick horse upon whose time to die they had gotten up a pool."

"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."

"Why was it everything was always so goddam complicated? Even the simplest things was so goddam complicated when you come to doing them."

"Especially in the beginning of the war, the guys who became good soldiers, and good infantry men sort of had to accept that they were dead — that they werent going to get out of it. The statistics were so much their enemy that there wouldnt be much chance that in four or five years, that they would survive it. Some did... and in fact most of the men who got in combat did survive it."

"You have to really work at it to write. I guess there has to be talent first; but even with talent you still have to work at it, to write."

"My grandfather had a saying he used to say to me when I was a kid ... "always remember that Im always for you, but Id rather be for you when youre right than when youre wrong." Well, thats the way I feel about America. Theres no use trying to say we havent done a lot of things that were bad. We have."

"Youve killed me. Whyd you want to kill me," he said, and died. The expression of hurt surprise and wounded reproach and sheer inability to understand stayed on his face like a forgotten suitcase left at the station, and gradually hardened there. Prew stood looking down at him, still shocked by the reproving question."

"I still think its probably the most evil of all pursuits. ... the thing is when youre getting shot at you dont think so much about whos right and whos wrong or whos good and whos and bad ... one of the first things they told you was "Forget about patriotism. Thats 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."

"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."

"This book is cheerfully dedicated to those greatest and most heroic of all human endeavors, WAR and WARFARE; may they never cease to give us the pleasure, excitement and adrenal stimulation that we need, or provide us with the heroes, the presidents and the leaders, the monuments and museums which we erect to them in the name of PEACE."

"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."