Joseph Heller Quotes
Joseph Heller Quotes
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
1949Every writer I know has trouble writing.
3845Just pass the work I assign along to somebody else and trust to luck. We call that delegation of responsibility.
4392I frequently feel I'm being taken advantage of merely because I'm asked to do the work I'm paid to do.
3307Why are they going to disappear him?'
I don't know.'
It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good grammar.
2729I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.
4892One 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.
2506They couldn't keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady.
1671What 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.
4407The captain was a good chess player, and the games were always interesting. Yossarian had stopped playing chess with him because the games were so interesting they were foolish.
2475But Yossarian knew he was right, because, as he explained to Clevinger, to the best of his knowledge he had never been wrong.
2359Yossarian 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
3881He wondered often how he would ever recognize the first chill, flush, twinge, ache, belch, sneeze, stain, lethargy, vocal slip, loss of balance or lapse of memory that would signal the inevitable beginning of the inevitable end.
1604The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.
4328It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.
2284Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian's fault. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.
2539The enemy," retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, "is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don't you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live.
1346Major Major never sees anyone in his office while he's in his office.
4855-You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!
4599That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance.
1480General 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".
2812Homer begged and Rembrandt went bankrupt. Aristotle, who had money for books, his school, and his museum, could not have bought this painting of himself.
Rembrandt could not afford a Rembrandt.
3137Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great. We are talking of only a painting.
2060Nately had a bad start. He came from a good family.
2482Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all.
2092The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.
2812Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur.
3954Because he needed a friend so desperately, he never found one.
1786