418 Quotes by Joseph Heller

"He woke up blinking with a slight pain in his head and opened his eyes upon a world boiling in chaos in which everything was in proper order."

"It takes brains not to make money,” Colonel Cargill wrote in one of the homiletic memoranda he regularly prepared for circulation over General Peckem’s signature. “Any fool can make money these days and most of them do. But what about people with talent and brains? Name, for example, one poet who makes money."

"The spirit gone, man is garbage."

"It doesn't matter whether they mean it or not. That's why they make little kids pledge allegiance even before they know what 'pledge' and 'allegiance' mean."

"That 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."

"   'What are you making?' he'd asked her one time out of curiosity that could no longer be borne in silence.   'You'll see,' she replied mysteriously.   He consulted his father. 'Pa, what's she making?'   'Mind your own business.'   'I was only asking.'   'Don't ask personal questions.'   'Rose, what's she knitting?' he asked his sister.   'Wool,' Belle answered.   'Belle, I know that. But what's she doing with it?'   'Knitting,' said Esther.   "

"He coughed quietly, gingerly, and dabbed"

"She reminded him of (...) all the shivering, stupefying misery in a world that never yet had provided enough heat and food and justice for all but an ingenious and unscrupulous handful. What a lousy earth!"

"His novel, a work he had wrestled with, on and off, for almost three years, he had finally abandoned after one page. The novel was derivative of a poem Gold had written seven years before that was itself derived from a brilliant exegesis by a young Englishman of the works of Samuel Beckett that Gold wished he'd written himself."

"My act of rebellion would be absorbed like rain on an ocean and leave no trace. I would not cause a ripple."