Joseph Heller Quotes
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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.
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Nurse Duckett found Yossarian wonderful and was already trying to change him.
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Everything passes. (That's what makes it endurable.)
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It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.
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As always occurred when he quarreled over principles in which he believed passionately, he would end up gasping furiously for air and blinking back bitter tears of conviction. There were many principles in which Clevinger believed passionately. He was crazy.
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Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskoph had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times.
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I had examined myself pretty thoroughly and discovered that I was unfit for military service.
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From men motivated by moral certitude, history teaches, no lasting good ever comes.
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Just for once I'd like to see all these things sort of straightened out, with each person getting exactly what he deserves. It might give me some confidence in this universe.
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There was only one catch and that was catch 22
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Let someone else get killed!
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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.
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I think that maybe inside any business, there is someone slowly going crazy
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The laws of nature are only as immutable as the minds which promote them. Ignorance of the law is 9/10ths of the law. Just because you aren't paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
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I don't understand the process of imagination-though I know that I am very much at its mercy.
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...Anything worth dying for ... is certainly worth living for.
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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.
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I think that maybe in every company today there is always at least one person who is going crazy slowly.
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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.
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That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed. It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.
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You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don't like bigots, bullies, snobs or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate." "Consciously, sir, consciously," Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. "I hate them consciously.
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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.
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Nately had a bad start. He came from a good family.
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He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.