I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
Why are they going to disappear him?’I don’t know.’It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t even good grammar.
They couldn’t keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady.
The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.
It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who’s dead.
Major Major never sees anyone in his office while he’s in his office.
-You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You’re dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!
Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.
He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt…
The captain was a good chess player, and the games were always interesting. Yossarian had stopped playing chess with him because the games were so interesting they were foolish.
But Yossarian knew he was right, because, as he explained to Clevinger, to the best of his knowledge he had never been wrong.
Nurse Duckett found Yossarian wonderful and was already trying to change him.
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.
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.
Nately had a bad start. He came from a good family.
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!
I don’t want to make sacrifices. I want to make dough.
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.
That goddam stunted, red-faced, big-cheeked, apple-cheeked, curlyheaded, midget assed, , google-eyed, undersized, grinning, buck-toothed rat!!” Yossarian sputtered.~ Catch-22
Depreciating motels, junked automobiles, and quick-food joints grow like amber waves of grain.
All through the night, men looked at the sky and were saddened by the stars.
mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow.
[Chief White Halfoat:] Racial prejudice is a terrible thing, Yossarian. It really is. It’s a terrible thing to treat a decent, loyal Indian like a nigger, kike, wop, or spic.
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.
…You know, one good apple can spoil the rest,” Colonel Korn concluded with conscious irony.
General Peckem even recommends that we send our men into combat in full-dress uniform so they’ll make a good impression on the enemy when they’re shot down”.
Hungry Joe was crazy, and no one knew it better than Yossarian, who did everything he could to help him. Hungry Joe just wouldn’t listen to Yossarian. Hungry Joe just wouldn’t listen because he thought Yossarian was crazy
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.
The important thing is to keep them pledging,” he explained to his cohorts. “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.
Nobody would have anything to do with him. He began to drop things and to trip. He had a shy and hopeful manner in each new contact, and he was always disappointed. Because he NEEDED a friend so desperately, he never found one.
He was pinched perspinngly in the epistemological dilemma of the skeptic, unable to accept solutions to problems he was unwilling to dismiss as unsolvable. He was never without misery, and never without hope.
There is no disappointment so numbing…as someone no better than you achieving more.
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?
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.
Frankly I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.
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.
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.