Joseph Heller (1923 – 1999)
American novelist and playwright.
"Climb, you bastard! Climb, climb, climb, climb! "
"You know, that might be the answer — to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail."
I do know that girls in their early twenties are easy and sweet. (Girls in their late twenties are easier but sad, and that isn't so sweet.) They are easy, I think, because they are sweet, and they are sweet, I think, because they are dumb.
No one lusting for blood is ever innocent. Or satisfied. I have not been innocent. Or satisfied. Just as the man who wants silver will not be satisfied with silver, a man who wants the blood of another will not be satisfied with having that blood, nor the woman with jewels be satisfied with jewels, and the man who wants women will not be satisfied with women. Don't try telling me different. Haven't I looked about me in the city and seen how all labor is for the mouth, yet the appetite is not filled? Don't I know myself that no want is ever satisfied? Wishes are granted, goals attained. But wants? Forget them. They live as long as the person they inhabit.
"Open your eyes, Clevinger. It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead."
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three.
He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive.
The end result of experiencing terror and injury is not an increase in compassion, but a tendency toward callousness.
Vanity. What's wrong with vanity? It doesn't satisfy.
"The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on."
How ironic the difference between me and my young son Absalom, between his soliciting the soundest means of overtaking me and having my life, while I was cudgeling my brains for a way to spare his. "Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom," were my mawkish words to my commanders as their men trooped past me toward the positions they would take up in the field outside the wood of Ephraim for the battle in which he would die. "Beware that none touch the young man Absalom," I urged like a fool. No, not like a fool, but like a fond, doting father who will overlook and excuse everything in the child he loves best, and who breaks his heart. And in that singular disparity in our desires abides his lasting victory over me: I loved him and he did not love me.
The problem with the loneliness I suffer is that the company of others has never been a cure for it.
The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likeable. In three days no one could stand him.
Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being crazy. Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts — and the question is: What does a sane man do in an insane society?
All is vanity, you know, ALL in the long run is but vanity and vexation of spirit.
"Let someone else get killed!"
"Suppose everyone on our side felt that way?"
"Well then I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?"
He could never decide whether to furgle them or photograph them, for he had found it impossible to do both simultaneously.
If character is destiny, the good are damned.
I think I may have been the first grown man in the world to fall truly, passionately, sexually, romantically and sentimentally in love. I practically invented it.
The wise man dies no better or more wisely than the fool. In what way, then, is the wise man wise?