Quotes from Joseph Heller

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?

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.

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

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

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?

You're inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age?

Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. That's some catch, that Catch-22, he observed. It's the best there is, Doc Daneeka agreed.

They couldn't him because he was Tarzan, Mandrake, Flash Gordon. He was Bill Shakespeare. He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Dreirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees. He was miracle ingredient Z-247.

Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that he wanted to smash his pale, sad, sickly face with his fist and knock him out of existence because he brought to mind all the pale, sad, sickly children in Italy that same night who needed haircuts and needed shoes and socks.

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.

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