Quotes from Joseph Heller

What the hell are you getting so upset about? he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. I thought you didn't believe in God. 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.

People have a right to do anything that's not forbidden by law, and there's no law against lying to you.

Maybe I am senile already and people are too kind to tell me. People are not kind and would tell me. (Maybe people have told me, and I'm too senile to remember).

Kraft was a skinny, harmless kid from Pennsylvania who wanted only to be liked, and was destined to be disappointed in even so humble and degrading an ambition. Instead, of being liked, he was dead, a bleeding cinder on the barbarous pile whom nobody had heard in those last precious moments while the plane with one wing plummeted.

He was a spry, suave and very precise general who knew the circumference of the equator and always wrote enhanced when he meant increased. He was a prick.

You haven't got a chance kid,' he had told him glumly.'They hate Jews.' 'But I'm not Jewish,' answered Clevinger. 'It will make no difference,' Yossarian promised, and Yossarian was right. 'They're after everybody.

Her own body was such a familiar and unremarkable thing to her that she was puzzled by the convulsive ecstasy men could take from it, by the intense and amusing need they had merely to touch it, to reach out urgently and press it, squeeze it, pinch it, rub it. She did not understand Yossarian's lust; but she was willing to take is word for it.

Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about.

Last night in the latrine. Didn't you whisper that we couldn't punish you to that other dirty son of a bitch we don't like? What's his name? Yossarian, sir, Lieutenant Scheisskopf said. Yes, Yossarian. That's right. Yossarian. Yossarian? Is that his name? Yossarian? What the hell kind of a name is Yossarian? Lieutenant Scheisskopf had the facts at his finger tips. It's Yossarian's name, sir, he explained.

But I'm afraid you have it backward. It is better to live on one's feet than die on one's knees. That is the way the saying goes.

What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you squarely in the eye and said he would rather die than be killed in combat, a man who was at least as mature and intelligent as you were and who you had to pretend was not? What could you say to him?

He was working hard at increasing his life span. He did it by cultivating boredom.