Joseph Heller - Something Happened (1974)

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I get the willies when I see closed doors. Even at work, where I am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely; if I am tired and dejected from a night of lies or booze or sex or just nerves and insomnia, I can almost smell the disaster mounting invisibly and flooding out toward me through the frosted glass panes. My hands may perspire, and my voice may come out strange. I wonder why.
Something must have happened to me sometime.

Joseph Heller
It's a wise person, I guess, who knows he's dumb, and an honest person who knows he's a liar. And it's a dumb person, I guess, who's convinced he is wise.

Joseph Heller
I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.

Joseph Heller
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.

Joseph Heller
In my middle years, I have exchanged the position of the fetus for the position of a corpse.

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
I think that maybe in every company today there is always at least one person who is going crazy slowly.

Joseph Heller
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.)

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