Joseph Heller (1923 – 1999)
American novelist and playwright.
He who steals my purse steals trash, but he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed.
When I grow up I want to be a little boy.
Women my wife's age with broken marriages take up robustly with fellows much younger than themselves, sometimes boys, and their husbands don't like that part of it at all. (It's a means they have of really sticking it to us. The husbands can do without the money and kids. But they can't abide their wives' humping a younger dick and letting everyone know.)
Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery or simple bad luck.
I imagine that God Himself frequently wants to feel like a king. Why else would He create the world?
The last thing any sensible human being should want is immortality. As it is, life lasts too long for most of us.
Everybody is as unstable as water.
If the chance ever comes to you to fall in love, grab it, every time. You might always live to regret it, but you won't find anything to beat it, and you won't know if it will come to you once more.
Clevinger was dead. That was the basic flaw in his philosophy.
Gold was opposed to segregation and equally opposed to integration. Certainly he did not believe that women or homosexuals should suffer persecution or discrimination. On the other hand, he was privately opposed to all equal rights amendments, for he certainly did not want members of either group associating with him on levels of equality or familiarity.
Morale 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.
The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with.
“From now on I'm thinking only of me.” Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: “But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way?”
“Then,” said Yossarian, “I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?”
All is vanity, you know, ALL in the long run is but vanity and vexation of spirit.
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?
The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likeable. In three days no one could stand him.
The problem with the loneliness I suffer is that the company of others has never been a cure for it.
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 enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on."