Quotes by Joseph Heller

About Joseph Heller:

Joseph Heller is an impossibility, and regardless of choice, a same negative outcome is a certainty. Although he is remembered primarily for Catch-22, his other works center on the lives of various members of the middle class and remain examples of modern satire.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Being born with a sickly resemblance to Henry Fonda was the first of a long series of practical jokes of which destiny was to make Major Major the unhappy victim throughout his joyless life. Being born Major Major Major was the second

Joseph Heller

-You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!

Joseph Heller

Nately had a bad start. He came from a good family.

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.

Joseph Heller

There is no light. I don't feel like starting my generator. I used to get a big kick out saving people's lives. Now I wonder what the hell's the point, since they all have to die anyway.Dr. Stubbs Catch -22

Joseph Heller

Politically, he was a humanitarian who did know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. He was constantly defending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his Communist enemies, and he was...

Joseph Heller

The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.

Joseph Heller

It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.

Joseph Heller

History did not demand Yossarian's premature demise, justice could be satisfied without it, progress did not hinge upon it, victory did not depend on it. That men would die was a matter of necessity; WHICH men would die, though, was a matter of circu...

Joseph Heller

They couldn't keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady.

Joseph Heller

What the hell are you getting so upset about?" he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. "I thought you didn't believe in God." "I don't," she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. "But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a ju...

Joseph Heller

The chaplain had sinned, and it was good. Common sense told him that telling lies and defecting from duty were sins. On the other hand, everyone knew that sin was evil and that no good could come from evil. But he did feel good; he felt positively ma...

Joseph Heller

There was shish-kabob for lunch, huge, savory hunks of spitted meat sizzling like the devil over charcoal after marinating seventy-two hours in a secret mixture Milo had stolen from a crooked trader in the Levant, served with Iranian rice and asparag...

Joseph Heller

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.

Joseph Heller

Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all.

Joseph Heller

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and...

Joseph Heller

Why are they going to disappear him?' I don't know.' It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good grammar.

Joseph Heller

But Yossarian knew he was right, because, as he explained to Clevinger, to the best of his knowledge he had never been wrong.

Joseph Heller

Colonel Cathcart is our commanding officer and we must obey him. Why don't you fly four more missions and see what happens?" "I don't want to." "Suppose we let you pick your missions and fly milk runs?" Major Major said. "That way you can fly the fou...

Joseph Heller

Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that he wanted to smash his pale. sad, sickly face with his fist and knock him out of existence

Joseph Heller

He wondered often how he would ever recognize the first chill, flush, twinge, ache, belch, sneeze, stain, lethargy, vocal slip, loss of balance or lapse of memory that would signal the inevitable beginning of the inevitable end.

Joseph Heller

Author Bio

  • NameJoseph Heller
  • DescriptionAmerican author
  • BornMay 1, 1923
  • DiedDecember 12, 1999
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Screenwriter; Novelist; Playwright
  • WorksCatch-22; Something Happened