Top 165 Quotes & Sayings by Joseph Heller - Page 2

What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.

When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering.

Everybody is as unstable as water.

They can do anything we can't stop them from doing.

... there is wisdom in madness and strong probability of truth in all accusations, for people are complete, and everyone is capable of everything.

If character is destiny, the good are damned.

Be glad you're even alive.' Be furious you're going to die.

Everything passes. (That's what makes it endurable.)

Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all. I'm cold,' Snowden said. 'I'm cold.

Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective.

They couldn't keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady.

¨ Oh, I´m not complaining. I know there´s a war on. I know a lot of people are going to have to suffer for us to win it. But why must I be one of them?¨

There was only one catch and that was catch 22

Where were you born?" "On a battlefield," [Yossarian] answered. "No, no. In what state were you born?" "In a state of innocence.

The problem with the loneliness I suffer is that the company of others has never been a cure for it.

How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements?

So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it then seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven?

I’m not running away from my responsibilities. I’m running to them. There’s nothing negative about running away to save my life.

It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.

I can't start writing until I have a closing line.

Now you've given them hope, and they're unhappy. So the blame is all yours.

The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.

I’m cold,' Snowden said softly, 'I’m cold.' 'You’re going to be all right, kid,' Yossarian reassured him with a grin. 'You’re going to be all right.' 'I’m cold,' Snowden said again in a frail, childlike voice. 'I’m cold.' 'There, there,' Yossarian said, because he did not know what else to say. 'There, there.' 'I’m cold,' Snowden whimpered. 'I’m cold.' 'There, there. There, there.

They're trying to kill me," Yossarian told him calmly. No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger cried. Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked. They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered. "They're trying to kill everyone." And what difference does that make?

The promises of maniacs, like those of women, are not safely relied upon.

It is the anonymous "they," the enigmatic "they" who are in charge. Who is "they"? I don't know. Nobody knows. Not even "they" themselves.

There is no disappointment so numbing...as someone no better than you achieving more.

Prostitution gives her an opportunity to meet people. It provides fresh air and wholesome exercise, and it keeps her out of trouble.

Under Colonel Korn's rule, the only people permitted to ask questions were those who never did.

I don't think it's good to achieve too much at too early an age. What else can the future give you if you've already got all that your imagination has dreamt up for you? A writer is only discovered once in a lifetime, and if it happens very early the impossibility of matching that moment again can have a somewhat corrosive effect on his personality and indeed on the work itself.

From now on I'm thinking only of me." Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: "But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way." "Then," said Yossarian, "I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?

He found Luciana sitting alone at a table in the Allied officers' night club, where the drunken Anzac major who had brought her there had been stupid enough to desert her for the ribald company of some singing comrades at the bar. "All right, I'll dance with you," she said, before Yossarian could even speak. "But I won't let you sleep with me." "Who asked you?" Yossarian asked her. "You don't want to sleep with me?" she exclaimed with surprise. "I don't want to dance with you.

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.

If God was dead, how could I feel this bad?

Major Major never sees anyone in his office while he's in his office.

When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.

It's a wise person, I guess, who knows he's dumb, and an honest person who knows he's a liar. And it's a dumb person, I guess, whose convinced he's wise...-Bob Slocum

I wouldn't want to live without strong misgivings.

Let someone else get killed!

Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskoph had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times.

It made him proud that 29 months in the service had not blunted his genius for ineptitude.

The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is highest in the world, will last as long as...the frog?

I couldn't see much point in tying myself down to a middle-aged woman with four children, even though the woman was my wife and the children were my own.

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.

I write longhand and I type and I rewrite on the typed pages.

Suppose everyone on our side felt that way?

All through the night, men looked at the sky and were saddened by the stars.

A man's head is his castle.

Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window, and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.

Fortunately, just when things were blackest, the war broke out.

I think that maybe in every company today there is always at least one person who is going crazy slowly.

I'm gonna live forever, or die trying.

The Lord gave us farmers two strong hands so we could grab as much as we could with both of them.

Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up.

Well then I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?

She was the epitome of stately sorrow each time she smiled.

Nurse Duckett found Yossarian wonderful and was already trying to change him.

If Richard Nixon was second-rate, what in the world is third-rate?

But how can one be warm alone?

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.