Top 100 Joseph Heller Quotes
#3. The only thing going on was a war, and no one seemed to notice but Yossarian and Dunbar. And when Yossarian tried to remind people, they drew away from him and thought he was crazy.
Joseph Heller
#4. Orr was one of the homeliest freaks Yossarian had ever encountered, and one of the most attractive.
Joseph Heller
#5. I never even realized I was Jewish until I was practically grown up. Or rather, I used to feel that everybody in the world was Jewish, which amounts to the same thing.
Joseph Heller
#6. And between us now there is this continual underground struggle over something trivial and nebulous that won't abate and has lasted nearly as long as the two of us have known each other. I love you.
Joseph Heller
#7. I've flown over seventy goddam combat missions. Don't talk to me about fighting to save my country. I've been fighting all along to save my country. Now I'm going to fight a little to save myself. The country's not in danger any more, but I am.
Joseph Heller
#8. Look, I might keep interested in this if you stop shouting it all over the island and if you stick to killing Colonel Cathcart. But if you're going to turn it into a bloodbath, you can forget about me.
Joseph Heller
#9. [They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.
Joseph Heller
#10. Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskoph had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times.
Joseph Heller
#11. I'm not running away from my responsibilities. I'm running to them. There's nothing negative about running away to save my life.
Joseph Heller
#12. Death was irreversible, he suspected, and he began to think he was going to lose
Joseph Heller
#13. But Yossarian knew he was right, because, as he explained to Clevinger, to the best of his knowledge he had never been wrong.
Joseph Heller
#14. One of the things he wanted to start screaming about was the surgeon's knife that was almost certain to be waiting for him and everyone else who lived long enough to die.
Joseph Heller
#15. Once when Gold was visiting in Florida,his father drew him across the street just to meet some friends and introduced him by saying,"This is my son's brother.The one that never amounted to much.
Joseph Heller
#16. Keep away, keep away," Hungry Joe screamed. "I said keep away, keep away, you goddam stinking lousy son of a bitch." "At least we found out what he dreams about," Dunbar observed wryly. "He dreams about goddam stinking lousy sons of bitches.
Joseph Heller
#18. I wonder what kind of person would come out if I ever did erase all my inhibitions at once, what kind of being is bottled up inside me now.
Joseph Heller
#19. I don't understand the process of imagination-though I know that I am very much at its mercy.
Joseph Heller
#20. [Chief White Halfoat:] Racial prejudice is a terrible thing, Yossarian. It really is. It's a terrible thing to treat a decent, loyal Indian like a nigger, kike, wop, or spic.
Joseph Heller
#21. Appleby was a fair-haired boy from Iowa who believed in God, Motherhood and the American Way of Life, without ever thinking about any of them, and everybody who knew him liked him.
Joseph Heller
#22. It sure is a pleasure not having Flume around in the mess hall any more. No more of that 'Pass the salt, Walt.'"
"Or 'Pass the bread, Fred.'"
"Or 'Shoot me a beet, Pete.
Joseph Heller
#24. A nagging bitch of a doubt, burrowing painlessly inside a conscience that felt perfectly clear
Joseph Heller
#25. I think that maybe in every company today there is always at least one person who is going crazy slowly.
Joseph Heller
#26. There was no established procedure for evasive action. All you needed was fear, and Yossarian had plenty of that, more fear than Orr or Hungry Joe, more fear even than Dunbar, who had resigned himself submissively to the idea that he must die someday
Joseph Heller
#27. Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all.
Joseph Heller
#28. There are yawning gulfs into which large chunks of me have fallen. I do not always know where I am at present.
Joseph Heller
#29. Major Major's father had a good joke about opportunity. "Opportunity only knocks once in this world," he would say. Major Major's father repeated this good joke at every opportunity.
Joseph Heller
#30. Homer begged and Rembrandt went bankrupt. Aristotle, who had money for books, his school, and his museum, could not have bought this painting of himself.
Rembrandt could not afford a Rembrandt.
Joseph Heller
#32. There's a rule saying I have to ground anyone who's crazy ... There's a catch. Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy.
Joseph Heller
#33. I've always depended very heavily on the good opinion of others.
Joseph Heller
#34. They were the most depressing group of people Yossarian had ever been with. They were always in high spirits.
Joseph Heller
#35. Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about.
Joseph Heller
#37. Just pass the work I assign along to somebody else and trust to luck. We call that delegation of responsibility.
Joseph Heller
#38. You've got flies in your eyes. That's why you can't see them.
Joseph Heller
#39. Major Major had lied, and it was good. He was not really surprised that it was good, for he had observed that people who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did not lie.
Joseph Heller
#40. Yossarian decided to change the subject. "Now you're changing the subject." he pointed out diplomatically. "I'll bet I can name two things to be miserable about for every one you can name to be thankful for.
Joseph Heller
#41. Now you've given them hope, and they're unhappy. So the blame is all yours.
Joseph Heller
#42. Prostitution gives her an opportunity to meet people. It provides fresh air and wholesome exercise, and it keeps her out of trouble.
Joseph Heller
#43. It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?
Joseph Heller
#44. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't,
but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. That's some catch, that catch-22.
Joseph Heller
#45. I have a feeling that someone nearby is soon going to find out something about me that will mean the end, although I can't imagine what that something is.
Joseph Heller
#46. He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it
Joseph Heller
#47. Bless you, my boy. Have a horseshoe." "Thank you, sir. What should I do with it?" "Throw it." "Away?" "At that peg there. Then pick it up and throw it at this
Joseph Heller
#48. But I'm afraid you have it backward. It is better to live on one's feet than die on one's knees. That is the way the saying goes.
Joseph Heller
#49. He was sick with lust and mesmerized with regret
Joseph Heller
#50. For war there is always enough. It's peace that's expensive.
Joseph Heller
#51. the platitudes of Americanism were horseshit. Number one, they didn't work. Number two, they weren't true. Number three, the people giving voice to them didn't believe them either.
Joseph Heller
#52. I had the strongest trade association in the world backing me up.
Joseph Heller
#53. I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.
Joseph Heller
#54. He was never without misery, and never without hope.
Joseph Heller
#55. It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
Joseph Heller
#56. All were successful,and felt like failures.
Gold no longer pretended to understand the nature of success.Instead,he pretended not to. He knew the components that were necessary:
None,
or maybe one:
Dumb luck
Joseph Heller
#57. Group Headquarters was alarmed, for there was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to. Colonel
Joseph Heller
#58. They think that they're smart and that the rest of us are dumb.
Joseph Heller
#59. What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you squarely in the eye and said he would rather die than be killed in combat, a man who was at least as mature and intelligent as you were and who you had to pretend was not? What could you say to him?
Joseph Heller
#60. Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great. We are talking of only a painting.
Joseph Heller
#62. It was truly a splendid structure, and Yossarian throbbed with a mighty sense of accomplishment each time he gazed at it and reflected that none of the work that had gone into it was his. There
Joseph Heller
#63. Hungry Joe was crazy, and no one knew it better than Yossarian, who did everything he could to help him. Hungry Joe just wouldn't listen to Yossarian. Hungry Joe just wouldn't listen because he thought Yossarian was crazy
Joseph Heller
#64. Like hell he was," said the first C.I.D. man. "I'm the C.I.D. man arround here."
Major Major could barely recognize him because he was wearing a faded maroon corduroy bathrobe with open seams under both arms, linty flannel pajamas, & worn house slippers with one flapping sole.
Joseph Heller
#65. The man who declares that survival at all costs is the end of existence is morally dead, because he's prepared to sacrifice all other values which give life its meaning. - SIDNEY HOOK
Joseph Heller
#66. I am miracle ingredient Z-247. I'm immense. I'm a real, slam-bang, honest-to-goodness, three-fisted humdinger. I'm a bona fide supraman.
Joseph Heller
#68. He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive. The
Joseph Heller
#69. Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it.
Joseph Heller
#71. To pray for their safety was to pray for the death of other young men he did not even know.
Joseph Heller
#72. Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
Joseph Heller
#73. Everyone agreed that Clevinger was certain to go far in the academic world. In short, Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains,
Joseph Heller
#74. He was like a man who had grown frozen with horror once and had never come completely unthawed.
Joseph Heller
#75. That's another thing that pisses me off about that Michelangelo statue of me in Florence. He's got me standing there uncircumcised! Who the fuck did he think I was?
Joseph Heller
#76. You have to be insane before they will let you fly no more missions, but the fact that you want to fly no more missions is proof that you are not insane.
Joseph Heller
#77. I've come to look upon death the same way I look upon root-canal work. Everyone else seems to get through it all right, so it couldn't be too difficult for me.
Joseph Heller
#78. How do you feel Yossarian?"
"Fine. No, I'm very frightened."
"That's good," said Major Danby. "It proves you're still alive. It won't be fun."
Yossarian started out. "Yes it will.
Joseph Heller
#79. The night was full of horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts ...
Joseph Heller
#80. They had not brains enough to be introverted and repressed. Cronies
Joseph Heller
#83. He felt imprisoned in an airplane. In an airplane there was absolutely no place in the world to go except to another part of the airplane. Doc Daneeka had been told that people who enjoyed climbing into an airplane were really giving vent to a subconscious desire to climb back into the womb.
Joseph Heller
#84. Gold was not sure of many things, but he was definite about one: for every successful person he knew, he could name at least two others of greater ability, better, and higher intelligence who, by comparison, had failed.
Joseph Heller
#85. The smartest people in Washington are the political reporters. They write about their inferiors.
Joseph Heller
#86. the full fury of his storming countenance with its rugged overhang of gullied forehead and huge crag of a humpbacked nose that came charging out of his face wrathfully like a Big Ten fullback.
Joseph Heller
#87. That's what Paradise is- never knowing the difference.
Joseph Heller
#88. Of course you're dying. We're all dying. Where the devil else do you think you're heading?
Joseph Heller
#90. Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?
Joseph Heller
#91. Let's take a drive into the middle of nowhere with a packet of Marlboro lights and talk about our lives.
Joseph Heller
#92. Major de Coverley is a noble and wonderful person, and everyone admires him.'
'He's a silly old fool who really has no right acting like a silly young fool. Where is he today? Dead?
Joseph Heller
#93. He could not make them understand that ... having a good time bored him and was not worth the effort.
Joseph Heller
#94. You know, one good apple can spoil the rest, Colonel Korn concluded with conscious irony.
Joseph Heller
#96. Like all the other officers at Group Headquarters except Major Danby, Colonel Cathcart was infused with the democratic spirit: he believed that all men were created equal, and he therefore spurned all men outside Group Headquarters with equal fervor.
Joseph Heller
#97. Being born with a sickly resemblance to Henry Fonda was the first of a long series of practical jokes of which destiny was to make Major Major the unhappy victim throughout his joyless life. Being born Major Major Major was the second
Joseph Heller
#98. He wondered often how he would ever recognize the first chill, flush, twinge, ache, belch, sneeze, stain, lethargy, vocal slip, loss of balance or lapse of memory that would signal the inevitable beginning of the inevitable end.
Joseph Heller
#99. Havermeyer was a lead bombardier who never missed. Yossarian was a lead bombardier who had been demoted because he no longer gave a damn whether he missed or not. He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive.
Joseph Heller
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