Quotes from Joseph Heller

He was like a man who had grown frozen with horror once and had never come completely unthawed

This makes my boredom worse. It's a real problem to decide whether it's more boring to do something boring than to pass along everything boring that comes in to somebody else and then have nothing to do at all.

He was someone in the know who was always striving pathetically to find out what was going on.

Certainly,nothing proceeded according to desire.In the long run, failure was the only thing that worked predictably. All else was accidental. Good intentions had miscarried, and bad ones had not improved.

It was love at first sight.

Gold never doubted that racial discrimination was atrocious, unjust, and despicably cruel and degrading. But he knew in his heart that he much preferred it the old way, when he was safer. Things were much better for him when they had been much worse.

Why can't you be a fatalist about it the way I am? If I'm destined to unload these lighters at a profit and pick up some Egyptian cotton cheap from Milo, then that's what I'm going to do. And if you're destined to be killed over Bologna, then you're going to be killed, so you might just as well go out and die like a man. I hate to say this, Yossarian, but you're turning into a chronic complainer

It's a pretty satisfying experience, pulling rank. You ought to try it sometime.

He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt

At the time, Heller was also working on his first novel, Catch-18. New World Writing published the first chapter in 1955; three years later Heller had a contract to publish the novel with Simon & Schuster. To avoid confusion with Leon Uris's 1961 novel Mila 18, Catch-18 was changed to Catch-22 before its publication in the same year.

Bless you, my boy. Have a horseshoe." "Thank you, sir. What should I do with it?" "Throw it." "Away?" "At that peg there. Then pick it up and throw it at this

We didn't want you to die by yourself." "What difference would it make?

agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.

The men were perfectly content to fly as manny missions as we asked them as long as thought they had no alternative. Now you've given them hope, and they're unhappy. So the blame is all yours.

And anything worth dying for," answered the sacrilegious old man, "is certainly worth living for.

Bless you, my boy. Have a horseshoe." "Thank you, sir. What should I do with it?" "Throw it." "Away?" "At that peg there. Then pick it up and throw it at this peg. It's a game, see? You get the horseshoe back.

I try not to think of that," Major Danby admitted frankly. "I try to concentrate on only the big result and to forget that they are succeeding, too. I try to pretend that they are not significant." "That's my trouble, you know," Yossarian mused sympathetically, folding his arms. "Between me and every ideal I always find Scheisskopfs, Peckems, Korns and Cathcarts. And that sort of changes the ideal.

He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt...

Dunbar was lying motionless on his back again with his eyes staring up at the ceiling like a doll's. He was working hard at increasing his life span. He did it by cultivating boredom. Dunbar was working so hard at increasing his life span that Yossarian thought he was dead.

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.

Sweden?" he cried. "Orr!" cried the chaplain. "Orr?" cried Yossarian. "Sweden!" cried the chaplain, shaking his head up and down with gleeful rapture and prancing about uncontrollably from spot to spot in a grinning, delicious frenzy. "It's a miracle, I tell you! A miracle! I believe in God again. I really do. Washed ashore in Sweden after so many weeks at sea! It's a miracle.

Actually, he was a very warm, compassionate man who never stopped feeling sorry for himself. "Why me?" was his constant lament, and the question was a good one.

Don't you see what that means? Now you can take me off combat duty and send me home. They're not going to send a crazy man out to be killed, are they?" "Who else will go?

he had been given a sign, a secret, enigmatic vision that he still lacked the boldness to divulge. There was no mistaking the awesome implications of the chaplain's revelation: it was either an insight of divine origin or a hallucination; he was either blessed or losing his mind.