Quotes from Joseph Heller

Appleby was as good at shooting crap as he was at playing Ping-Pong, and he was as good at playing Ping-Pong as he was at everything else. Everything Appleby did, he did well. 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. I hate that son of a bitch, Yossarian growled.

The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.

Major Major's father had a good joke about opportunity. Opportunity only knocks once in this world, he would say. Major Major's father repeated this good joke at every opportunity.

With a little ingenuity and vision, he had made it all but impossible for anyone in the squadron to talk to him, which was just fine with everyone, he noticed, since no one wanted to talk to him anyway.

First impressions die slowly, bad impressions take even longer

General Peckem even recommends that we send our men into combat in full-dress uniform so they'll make a good impression on the enemy when they're shot down.

I will give you intelligence, submitted the Creator, enough knowledge to destroy everything on earth, but you will have to use it. Done! said our ancestor and that was our Genesis.

The chaplain glanced at the bridge table that served as his desk and saw only the abominable orange-red, pear-shaped, plum tomato he had obtained that same morning from Colonel Cathcart, still lying on its side where he had forgotten it like an indestructible and incarnadine symbol of his own ineptitude.

That's not what justice is, the colonel jeered, and began pounding the table again with his big fat hand. That's what Karl Marx is. I'll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning. Garroting. That's what justice is when we've all got to be tough enough and rough enough to fight Billy Petrolle. From the hip. Get it?

Some Promised Land. The honey was there, but the milk we brought in with our goats. To people in California, God gives a magnificent coastline, a movie industry, and Beverly Hills. To us He gives sand. To Cannes He gives a plush film festival. We get the PLO. Our winters are rainy, our summers hot. To people who didn't know how to wind a wristwatch He gives underground oceans of oil. To us He gives hernia, piles, and anti-Semitism.

Colonel Cathcart was impervious to absolutes. He could measure his own progress only in relationship to others, and his idea of excellence was to do something at least as well as all the men his own age who were doing the same thing even better.

He could not make them shut-up; they were worse than women. They had not brains enough to be introverted and repressed.

He's back! He's back! Who's back? shouted someone else. Who is it? What does it mean? What should we do? Are we on fire? Get up and run, damn it! Everybody get up and run!

Sure, there's a catch," Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy.

Man was matter. Drop him out of a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage.

Shooting skeet eight hours a month was excellent training for them. It trained them to shoot skeet.

You've got to have a God. Without God, you might turn to something really crazy, like witchcraft, or religion.

As soon as there was profit, there were people who wanted to make it, more than they wanted to make anything else.

I've always depended very heavily on the good opinion of others.

Even when he cheated he couldn't win, because the people he cheated against were always better at cheating too.

You've got flies in your eyes. That's why you can't see them.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.

The only end in sight was Yossarian's own, and he might have remained in the hospital until doomsday had it not been for that patriotic Texan with his infundibuliform jowls and his lumpy, rumpleheaded, indestructible smile cracked forever across the front of his face like the brim of a black ten-gallon hat.

Good God, 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?