People From Illinois

"In other words, the fact that the criterion we happen to use has a fine ancestry of highbrow statistical theorems does not justify its use. Such justification must come from empirical evidence that it works."

"Postulate 1. All chance systems of causes are not alike in the sense that they enable us to predict the future in terms of the past."

"Progress in modifying our concept of control has been and will be comparatively slow. In the first place, it requires the application of certain modern physical concepts; and in the second place it requires the application of statistical methods which up to the present time have been for the most part left undisturbed in the journal in which they appeared."

"Broadly speaking, the object of industry is to set up economic ways and means of satisfying human wants and in so doing to reduce everything possible to routines requiring a minimum amount of human effort."

"If I knew you and you knew me— If both of us could clearly see, And with an inner sight divine The meaning of your heart and mine I'm sure that we would differ less And clasp our hands in friendliness: Our thoughts would pleasantly agree, If I knew you and you knew me."

"A rose to the living is more Than sumptuous wreaths to the dead."

"Though life is made up of mere bubbles, 'T is better than many aver, For while we've a whole lot of troubles, The most of them never occur."

"No man can feel himself alone The while he bravely stands Between the best friends ever known His two good, honest hands."

"Lafayette, nous voilà!"

"Love seeks a guerdon; friendship is as God, Who gives and asks no payment."

"Shall the iron argue with the smith what it would be? Or, shall the wrought iron reason with the monger To whom it would be sold?"

"How loving is the Lord God and how strong withal!"

"The great white cold walks abroad!"

"The East and the West in the spring of the world shall blend As a man and a woman that plight Their troth in the warm spring night."

"The people blossoms armies and puts forth The splendid summer of its noiseless might."

"Nor love they least Who strike with right good will To vanquish ill And fight God’s battle upward from the beast."

"For ’t is always fair weather When good fellows get together With a stein on the table and a good song ringing clear."

"Spring in the world! And all things are made new!"

"I have need of the sky, I have business with the grass; I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling Lone and high, And the slow clouds go by. I will get me away to the waters that glass The clouds as they pass. I will get me away to the woods."

"Who would not rather founder in the fight Than not have known the glory of the fray?"

"Praise be to you, O hills, that you can breathe Into our souls the secret of your power!"

"There are worser ills to face Than foemen in the fray; And many a man has fought because— He feared to run away."

"In all climes we pitch out tents, Cronies of the elements, With the secret lords of birth Intimate and free."

"There is no sorrow like a love denied Nor any joy like love that has its will."

"Fair weather weddings make fair weather lives."

"My grandfather had a saying he used to say to me when I was a kid ... "always remember that I'm always for you, but I'd rather be for you when you're right than when you're wrong." Well, that's the way I feel about America. There's no use trying to say we haven't done a lot of things that were bad. We have."

"James Jones was a curiously American phenomenon: the great novelist who comes out of nowhere, equipped only with talent and a fierce determination to write."

"For novel readers who care about war and warriors who cared about novels, a great memory is the picture, seen in tens of millions of imaginations, and finally in a film, of Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt playing taps at Schofield Barracks, 25 miles from Honolulu, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, in James Jones's great novel, From Here to Eternity. It was published 55 years ago and sold three million copies, and it is on my mind today because I'm thinking about the taps we will all hear this Monday, Memorial Day, at ceremonies and in cemeteries throughout the country. When I hear it I'm going to think of what my father always said when he heard taps. "Play it, Prewitt," he'd say. Because that character was like men he'd known in the American army of World War II."

"It's rare that a song grounded in reality moves me because I don't feel like I'm getting the whole story. Songs are made to exist in and of themselves, like a great James Jones or Robert Louis Stevenson novel — they're not autobiographical, and yet there's a reality in every single page. It's real life of the imagination."

"He wanted to go very deep ... but he was not a stylist at all. Sometimes his efforts to go deep seemed superficially very clumsy. But consider the effect that the book From Here to Eternity had on everybody I knew — on writers, on fans — and myself included. It just knocked me absolutely cold. We didn't care about the style; I mean, who could care about the style? You were just tremendously moved. I think Prewitt became the prototype for all the laconic, quiet, mysterious, basically tragic heroes populating almost every novel there is now."

"I learned a lot about the play of emotion. There was a part of me that whistled in the dark, and said, "It's all right, he wrote a very good book; it's probably better than The Naked and the Dead." I must tell you now, in this point of my literary existence, I think it was better than The Naked and the Dead, because it went into the taproot of Army experience. I had learned a lot in the Army from a couple of years in it, and it had had a huge effect on me, and I'd been able to write a pretty good novel with it. But it hadn't been my life in the way it had been for Jones. He hadn't had a successful career life as an adolescent and a young man, so he went into that Regular Army. That was going to be his life; that was going to be his existence. It wasn't something he was going to get out of necessarily. And so his book, I felt, went deeper into the nature of what it was like to be a soldier. So I thought, yes, it was a better book than I had written."

"James Jones is an established literary figure. He's a monumental figure, a novelist. I remember him best for From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line — among the best war literature of Americans. Probably for this reason: I think it is one of the few war books written by somebody who was there, in the military and in combat. Most of our other war books are not."

"For almost thirty years, James Jones was the friend, and frequently the benefactor, of American writers at home and abroad. Despite his clear importance in the writing community, the academy still largely ignores him. PMLA biographies from 1951 to 1976 list only ten articles about his work in scholarly journals and essay collections, three of which are in publications outside the United States. It often seems that, when academicians remember Jones, it is as the spokesman for an anachronistic male supremacy or as a writer of flawed naturalistic prose."

"James Jones was not just a good writer but a good man."

"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 have separate lists titled by characters in which I list each scene concerning that character consecutively and also the proposed scenes for that character along with notes of how I want to write it. So I take these and by them map out ahead the final draft, interlacing the scenes between various characters. Wonderful, isn't it? If I fail as a writer, I can always become a bookkeeper. I have always been bothered because I couldn't remember details of time, place, etc. and I used to find myself either surrounded by reams of written pages, or else rewriting the same thing three or four times. This helps somewhat to alleviate that."

"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.)"

"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."

"In spite of all the training you get and precautions you take to keep yourself alive, it's largely a matter of luck that decided whether or not you get killed. It doesn't make any difference who you are, how tough you are, how nice a guy you might be, or how much you may know, if you happen to be at a certain spot at a certain time, you get it. I've seen guys out of one hole to a better one and get it the next minute, whereas if they'd stayed still they wouldn't have been touched. I've seen guys decide to stay in a hole instead of moving and get it. I've seen guys move and watch the hole they were in get blown up a minute later. And I've seen guys stay and watch the place to which they had intended to move get blown up. It's all luck."

"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."

"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."

"Here's the way I wrote in one of the things I wrote a while back: "But since he had been in the army, he had come to understand his ungraspable longing and his phantasmal and belly-shrinking dissatisfaction: there were such things he wanted to be, to do, to write: He wanted to be the voice that shrieked out the agony of frustration and lostness and despair and loneliness, that all men feel, yet cannot understand; the voice that rolled forth the booming, intoxicating laughter of men's joy; the voice that richly purred men's love of good hot food and spicy strong drink; men's love of thick, moist, pungent tobacco smoke on a full belly; men's love of woman: voluptuous, throaty voiced, silken-thighed, and sensual." I suppose that sounds an awful lot like Wolfe, but if it does, it's exactly the way I feel."

"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."

"We got the word that the four of them were coming a month before they arrived. Scattered all across the country in the different hospitals as we were, it was amazing how fast word of any change got back to us. When it did, we passed it back and forth among ourselves by letter or post card. We had our own private network of communications flung all across the map of the nation. There were only four of them this time. But what an important four. Winch. Strange. Prell. And Landers. About the four most important men the company had held."

"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."

"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."

"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 weren't going to get out of it. The statistics were so much their enemy that there wouldn't 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."

"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."

"There's only a thin red line between the sane and the mad."

"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."