Quotes from Joseph Heller

That's what Paradise is- never knowing the difference.

This stuff is better than cotton candy, really it is. It's made out of real cotton. Yossarian, you've got to help me make the men eat it. Egyptian cotton is the finest cotton in the world.

It was truly a splendid structure, 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.

Yossarian attended the education sessions because he wanted to find out why so many people were working so hard to kill him.

And between us now there is this continual underground struggle over something trivial and nebulous that won't abate and has lasted nearly as long as the two of us have known each other. I love you.

Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise.

Moses has the Ten Commandments, it's true, but I've got much better lines - King David

She reminded him of (...) all the shivering, stupefying misery in a world that never yet had provided enough heat and food and justice for all but an ingenious and unscrupulous handful. What a lousy earth!

Like hell he was, said the first C.I.D. man. I'm the C.I.D. man arround here. Major Major could barely recognize him because he was wearing a faded maroon corduroy bathrobe with open seams under both arms, linty flannel pajamas, & worn house slippers with one flapping sole.

You have a morbid aversion to dying.

a nagging bitch of a doubt, burrowing painlessly inside a conscience that felt perfectly clear

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.

Mi problema con la soledad es que la compañía de otros nunca ha sido una cura para ella.

He was pinched perspiringly in the epistemological dilemma of the skeptic, unable to accept solutions to problems he was unwilling to dismiss as unsolvable. He was never without misery, and never without hope.

He felt imprisoned in an airplane. In an airplane there was absolutely no place in the world to go except to another part of the airplane.

he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves. What a welcome sight a leper must have been!

Just for once I'd like to see all these things sort of straightened out, with each person in the universe getting exactly what he deserves. It might give me some confidence in this universe.

Appleby was a fair-haired boy from Iowa who believed in God, Motherhood and the American Way of Life, without ever thinking about any of them, and everybody who knew him liked him.

Everyone was always very friendly toward him, and no one was ever very nice; everyone spoke to him, and no one ever said anything.

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

that you have to be insane before they will let you fly no more missions, but the fact that you want to fly no more missions is proof that you are not insane.

And he knew something else as a social evolutionist that he might stress someday in his 'Every Change Is for the Worse' should he ever find time to write it: Gold knew that the most advanced and penultimate stage of a civilization was attained when chaos masqueraded as order, and he knew we were already there.

You will hurt your foot.

As far as I know, I'm the only Captain Yossarian I know, but that's only as far as I know.