Quotes from Joseph Heller

One had to know Plato personally to appreciate the love he suppressed puritanically for the music, poetry, and drama he censured in his philosophy and censored in his model communities. They moved him too deeply.

There was no established procedure for evasive action. All you needed was fear, and Yossarian had plenty of that, more fear than Orr or Hungry Joe, more fear even than Dunbar, who had resigned himself submissively to the idea that he must die someday

The Texan wanted everybody in the ward to be happy but Yossarian and Dunbar. He was really very sick.

If you run into trouble, just tell everybody that the security of the country requires a strong domestic Egyptian-cotton speculating industry.

He could not make them understand that he was a crotchety old fogey of twenty-eight, that he belonged to another generation, another era, another world, that having a good time bored him and was not worth the effort, and that they bored him, too. He could not make them shut up; they were worse than women. They had not brains enough to be introverted and repressed.

Yossarian left money in the old woman's lap—it was odd how many wrongs leaving money seemed to right—and

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.

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.

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

I don't want to make sacrifices. I want to make dough.

In fact, though the books came slowly, he was a novelist to his bootlaces, an avid narrator who couldn't stop the story once it had started, who felt the terrors of existence so acutely that he had to tell them and tell them until he'd made them something else.