Joseph Heller Quotes

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“Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.”

“Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur.”

“You wouldn’t be normal if you were never afraid. Even the bravest men experience fear. One of the biggest jobs we all face in combat is to overcome fear.”

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

“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.”

“They might have occurred if either General Dreedle or General Peckem had once evinced an interest in taking part in orgies with him, but neither ever did, and the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him.”

“Everybody is as unstable as water.”

“Clevinger was dead. That was the basic flaw in his philosophy.”

“Nothing fails like success.”

“I hate God and I hate life. And the closer I come to death, the more I hate life.”

“I do know that girls in their early twenties are easy and sweet. (Girls in their late twenties are easier but sad, and that isn't so sweet.) They are easy, I think, because they are sweet, and they are sweet, I think, because they are dumb.”

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

“Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being crazy. Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts — and the question is: What does a sane man do in an insane society?”

“I get the willies when I see closed doors. Even at work, where I am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely; if I am tired and dejected from a night of lies or booze or sex or just nerves and insomnia, I can almost smell the disaster mounting invisibly and flooding out toward me through the frosted glass panes. My hands may perspire, and my voice may come out strange. I wonder why. Something must have happened to me sometime.”

“Love is potent stuff, isn't it?”

“Gold was opposed to segregation and equally opposed to integration. Certainly he did not believe that women or homosexuals should suffer persecution or discrimination. On the other hand, he was privately opposed to all equal rights amendments, for he certainly did not want members of either group associating with him on levels of equality or familiarity.”

“I'm not even sure we really had that much need for God as much as we did seem to have a need to believe in Him.”

“Do you know how long a year takes when it's going away?" Dunbar repeated to Clevinger. "This long." He snapped his fingers. "A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air. Today you're an old man."
"Old?" asked Clevinger with surprise. "What are you talking about?"
"Old."
"I'm not old."
"You're inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow down?" Dunbar was almost angry when he finished.
"Well, maybe it is true," Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. "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?”

“Now THERE'S a hollow state to be in, isn't it — to believe in God and get no sign that He's there.”

“The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth. Don't you know history?”

“I am arrogant enough to wish I were modest as he and modest enough to know that this is arrogance.”

“No one lusting for blood is ever innocent. Or satisfied. I have not been innocent. Or satisfied. Just as the man who wants silver will not be satisfied with silver, a man who wants the blood of another will not be satisfied with having that blood, nor the woman with jewels be satisfied with jewels, and the man who wants women will not be satisfied with women. Don't try telling me different. Haven't I looked about me in the city and seen how all labor is for the mouth, yet the appetite is not filled? Don't I know myself that no want is ever satisfied? Wishes are granted, goals attained. But wants? Forget them. They live as long as the person they inhabit.”

“In my middle years, I have exchanged the position of the fetus for the position of a corpse.”

“Vanity. What's wrong with vanity? It doesn't satisfy.”

“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?”

“There was no way of knowing anything, he knew, not even that there was no way of knowing anything.”

“When one is infatuated, faults are endearing that in others would be heinous.”

“If character is destiny, the good are damned.”

“It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”

“All is vanity, you know, ALL in the long run is but vanity and vexation of spirit.”

“Yossarian — the very sight of the name made him shudder. There were so many esses in it. It just had to be subversive. It was like the word subversive itself. It was like seditious and insidious too, and like socialist, suspicious, fascist and Communist.”

“If the chance ever comes to you to fall in love, grab it, every time. You might always live to regret it, but you won't find anything to beat it, and you won't know if it will come to you once more.”

“He who steals my purse steals trash, but he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed.”

“I said it again as a German might. "Rabinovitz. Ich bin Lew Rabinowitz, LR, von Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York. Du Kennst?" And then I spoke Yiddish. "Und ich bin ein Yid. Farshtest?" And then in English. "I am a Jew. Understand?" And then in my fractured German. "Ich bin Jude. Verstehst?" Now they didn't know where to look, but they did not want to look at me. I've got blue eyes that can turn into slits of ice, Claire still tells me, and a pale, European skin that can turn red fast when I laugh hard or get mad, and I wasn't sure they believed me.”

“Women don't suffer from penis envy. Men do.”

“Didn't I once observe that there is nothing new under the sun?”

“The end result of experiencing terror and injury is not an increase in compassion, but a tendency toward callousness.”

“He could never decide whether to furgle them or photograph them, for he had found it impossible to do both simultaneously.”

“But I make a profit of three and a quarter cents an egg by selling them for four and a quarter cents an egg to the people in Malta I buy them from for seven cents an egg. Of course, I don't make the profit. The syndicate makes the profit. And everybody has a share.”

“Outside the hospital the war was still going on. Men went mad and were rewarded with medals.”

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

“God does have this self-serving habit of putting all blame for His own mistakes on other people, doesn't He? He picks someone arbitrarily, unbidden, right out of the blue so to speak, and levies upon them tasks of monumental difficulty for which we don't always measure up in every particular, then charges US for HIS error in selecting imperfectly. He tends to forget that we are no more infallible than He is.”

“When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as Catch-22 I'm tempted to reply, "Who has?"”

“I imagine that God Himself frequently wants to feel like a king. Why else would He create the world?”

“"Let someone else get killed!" "Suppose everyone on our side felt that way?" "Well then I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?"”

“The yellow moon turned orange and was soon red as the setting sun.”

“Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing.”

“Climb, you bastard! Climb, climb, climb, climb!”

“The last thing any sensible human being should want is immortality. As it is, life lasts too long for most of us.”