Joseph Heller Quotes

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Gold was not altogether certain what, anatomically, a gorge was, but he knew that his was rising.

Joseph Heller
It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.

Joseph Heller
When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering.

Joseph Heller
Fortunately, just when things were blackest, the war broke out.

Joseph Heller
He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

Joseph Heller
No one who ever wants praise will be satisfied with praise, the person who wants love cannot be satisfied with love. No want is ever fulfilled. And therefore I still don't know whether it is better to fear God and keep His commandments or to curse God and die.

Joseph Heller
What do you do when it rains?" The captain answered frankly. "I get wet.

Joseph Heller
In the long run, failure was the only thing that worked predictably. All else was accidental.

Joseph Heller
How do you expect anyone to believe you have a liver condition if you keep squeezing the nurses' tits every time you get a chance? You're going to have to give up sex if you want to convince people you've got an ailing liver.

Joseph Heller
Nurse Duckett found Yossarian wonderful and was already trying to change him.

Joseph Heller
Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it.

Joseph Heller
I don't believe in miracles because it's been a long time since we've had any.

Joseph Heller
There are yawning gulfs into which large chunks of me have fallen. I do not always know where I am at present.

Joseph Heller
I don't think the 'what' distinguishes a good novel from a bad one but rather the 'how.'

Joseph Heller
He was pinched perspiringly in the epistemological dilemma of the skeptic, unable to accept solutions to problems he was unable to dismiss as unsolvable. He was never without misery and never without hope.

Joseph Heller
I never even realized I was Jewish until I was practically grown up. Or rather, I used to feel that everybody in the world was Jewish, which amounts to the same thing.

Joseph Heller
If a man is going to leave one wife to marry another, it's better if he divorces the first before he marries the second.

Joseph Heller
Yossarian had so many ailments to be afraid of that he was sometimes tempted to turn himself in to the hospital for good and spend the rest of his life stretched out there inside an oxygen tent with a battery of specialists and nurses seated at one side of his bed twenty-four hours a day waiting for something to go wrong..

Joseph Heller
She was a crazy mathematics major from the Wharton School of Business who could not count to twenty-eight each month without getting into trouble.

Joseph Heller
I've come to look upon death the same way I look upon root-canal work. Everyone else seems to get through it all right, so it couldn't be too difficult for me.

Joseph Heller
History was a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind. Surely, Watt with his steam engine, Faraday with his electric motor, and Edison with his incandescent light bulb did not have it as their goal to contribute to a fuel shortage some day that would place their countries at the mercy of Arab oil.

Joseph Heller
Now you've given them hope, and they're unhappy. So the blame is all yours.

Joseph Heller
It got me so excited that I did what the cliché says you're supposed to do: I jumped out of bed and paced the floor. That morning I went to my job at the advertising agency and wrote out the first chapter in longhand.... One year later, after much planning, I began chapter two.

Joseph Heller
I'm not running away from my responsibilities. I'm running to them. There's nothing negative about running away to save my life.

Joseph Heller
A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural.

Joseph Heller
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.

Joseph Heller
Something 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.

Joseph Heller
Anything worth dying for... is certainly worth living for.

Joseph Heller
While none of the work we do is very important, it is important that we do a great deal of it.

Joseph Heller
But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.

Joseph Heller