Quotes from Joseph Heller

Az eszmények jók, de az emberek néha nem olyan jók.

When people disagreed with him, he urged them to be objective.

Why are they going to disappear him?" "I don't know." "It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?

No such private nights of ecstasy or hushed-up drinking and sex orgies ever occurred. 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.

Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes.

In a way the C.I.D. man was pretty lucky, because outside the hospital the war was still going on. Men went mad and were rewarded with medals. All over the world, boys on every side of the bomb line were laying down their lives for what they had been told was their country, and no one seemed to mind, least of all the boys who were laying down their young lives. There was no end in sight.

I don't,' she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. '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.

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

They couldn't touch him because he was Tarzan, Mandrake, Flash Gordon. He was Bill Shakespeare. He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees.

Through the lavender gloom clouding the entrance of the operations tent, Yossarian glimpsed Chief White Halfoat, diligently embezzling whiskey rations, forging the signatures of nondrinkers and pouring off the alcohol with which he was poisoning himself into separate bottles rapidly in order to steal as much as he could before Captain Black roused himself with recollection and came hurrying over indolently to steal the rest himself.

One hand washes the other. Know what I mean? You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." Yossarian knew what he meant. "That's not what I meant," Doc Daneeka said as Yossarian began scratching his back.

It was just before dawn during the Great Big Siege of Bologna, when tongueless dead men peopled the night hours like living ghosts and Hungry Joe was half out of his mind with anxiety because he had finished his missions

Everyone agreed that Clevinger was certain to go far in the academic world. In short, Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains

Meglátni és megszeretni egy pillanat m?ve volt.

Once when Gold was visiting in Florida,his father drew him across the street just to meet some friends and introduced him by saying,This is my son's brother.The one that never amounted to much.

My act of rebellion would be absorbed like rain on an ocean and leave no trace. I would not cause a ripple.

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? I do, Dunbar told him. Why? Clevinger asked. What else is there?

When salesmen are doing well, there is pressure upon them to begin doing better, for fear they may start doing worse.

Immediately next door to Yossarian was Havermeyer, who liked peanut brittle and lived all by himself in the two-man tent in which he shot tiny field mice every night with huge bullets from the .45 he had stolen from the dead man in Yossarian's tent.

She listens to him with great intensity because she is paying no attention to him at all.

Oh, don't you worry about that," Yossarian comforted him with a toneless snicker as the engines of the jeeps and ambulance fractured the drowsy silence and the vehicles in the rear began driving away backward.

Yossarian's attitude towards his roommates turned merciful and protective at the mere recollection of Captain Black. It was not their fault that they were young and cheerful, he reminded himself as he carried the swinging beam of his flashlight back through the darkness. He wished that he could be young and cheerful, too. And it wasn't their fault that they were courageous, confident and carefree.

It doesn't matter whether they mean it or not. That's why they make little kids pledge allegiance even before they know what 'pledge' and 'allegiance' mean.

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.