Joseph Heller Quotes
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The smartest people in Washington are the political reporters. They write about their inferiors.
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Only Hungry Joe had something better to do each time he finished his missions. He had screaming nightmares and won fist fights with Huple's cat.
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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.
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He was sick with lust and mesmerized with regret
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You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!
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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.
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I write longhand and I type and I rewrite on the typed pages.
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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.
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Where were you born?" "On a battlefield," Yossarian answered. "No, no. In what state were you born?" "In a state of innocence.
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It made him proud that 29 months in the service had not blunted his genius for ineptitude.
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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.
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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?
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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?
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Well then I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?
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I wouldn't want to live without strong misgivings.
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How did I get here? Somebody pushed me. Somebody must have set me off in this direction and clus-ters of other hands must have touched themselves to the controls at various times, for I would not have picked this way for the world.
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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?
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Actually there were many officers' clubs that Yossarian had not helped build, but he was proudest of the one on Pianosa. It was a sturdy and complex monument to his powers of determination. Yossarian never went there to help until it was finished; then he went there often, so pleased was he with the large , fine, rambling shingled building. It was a truly splendid building, 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.
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In short, Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found it out.
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He was never without misery, and never without hope.
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But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make him out to be.
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Fortunately, just when things were blackest, the war broke out.
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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
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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?