The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Joseph Heller

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.

Simple, Luck, Injustice

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22 which specified the concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.

Frankly I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.

Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs divorce fornication bullying travel meditation medication depression neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

realistic, expectations

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 asparagus tips Parmesan, followed by cherries jubilee for dessert and then steaming cups of fresh coffee with Benedictine and brandy.

That goddam stunted, red-faced, big-cheeked, apple-cheeked, curlyheaded, midget assed, , google-eyed, undersized, grinning, buck-toothed rat!!” Yossarian sputtered.~ Catch-22

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.

I don’t want to make sacrifices. I want to make dough.

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!

injustice, suffering

The spirit gone, man is garbage.

catch-22, garbage, man, spirit

Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?” “I do,” Dunbar told him. “Why?” Clevinger asked. “What else is there?

life, mortality