Joseph Heller Quotes
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Prostitution gives her an opportunity to meet people. It provides fresh air and wholesome exercise, and it keeps her out of trouble.
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It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
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They agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.
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Fortunately, just when things were blackest, the war broke out.
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I'm gonna live forever, or die trying.
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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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Gold was not altogether certain what, anatomically, a gorge was, but he knew that his was rising.
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If character is destiny, the good are damned.
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You're an intelligent person of great moral character who has taken a very courageous stand. I'm an intelligent person with no moral character at all, so I'm in an ideal position to appreciate it.
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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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We do have a zeal for laughter in most situations, give or take a dentist.
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He was never without misery, and never without hope.
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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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The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.
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The problem with the loneliness I suffer is that the company of others has never been a cure for it.
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But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.
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Why are they going to disappear him?' I don't know.' It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good grammar.
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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.
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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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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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Rise above principal and do what's right.
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All of our religions but the Judaic and the Greek think more of us dead than alive.
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Well, he died. You don't get any older than that.
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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.