Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about.
If God was dead, how could I feel this bad?
The Lord gave us farmers two strong hands so we could grab as much as we could with both of them.
The question is: what is a sane man to do in an insane society?
They can do anything we can’t stop them from doing.
Only Hungry Joe had something better to do each time he finished his missions. He had screaming nightmares and won fist fights with Huple’s cat.
And anything worth dying for.
Nately had a bad start. He came from a good family.
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 circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance. But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.
Yossarian – the very sight of the name made Colonel Cathcart shudder. There were so many esses in it. It just had to be subversive. It was like the word “subversive” itself. It was like “seditious” and “insidious” too, and like “socialist,” “suspicious,” “fascist” and “Communist.” It was an odious, alien, distasteful name, a name that just did not inspire confidence.
Under Colonel Korn’s rule, the only people permitted to ask questions were those who never did. Soon the only people attending were those who never asked questions, and the sessions were discontinued altogether, since Clevinger, the corporal and Colonel Korn agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.
After he made up his mind to spend the rest of the war in the hospital, Yossarian wrote letters to everyone he knew saying that he was in the hospital but never mentioning why. One day he had a better idea. To everyone he knew he wrote that he was going on a very dangerous mission. “They asked for volunteers. It’s very dangerous, but someone has to do it. I’ll write you the instant I get back.” And he had not written anyone since.
Clevinger is a very bright guy, a Harvard man, who knows everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
Of course you’re dying. We’re all dying. Where the devil else do you think you’re heading?
Kraft was a skinny, harmless kid from Pennsylvania who wanted only to be liked, and was destined to be disappointed in even so humble and degrading an ambition. Instead, of being liked, he was dead, a bleeding cinder on the barbarous pile whom nobody had heard in those last precious moments while the plane with one wing plummeted.
It’s a real problem to decide whether it’s more boring to do something boring than to pass along everything boring that comes in to somebody else and then have nothing to do at all.
And don’t tell me God works in mysterious ways,” Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. “There’s nothing so mysterious about it. He’s not working at all. He’s playing. Or else He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about – a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed.
Little by little, or maybe all at once, everything comes to mean its opposite; unreason argues itself into reason, and vice versa, and we cannot see the seams.
The spirit gone, man is garbage.
Be thankful you’re healthy.” “Be bitter you’re not going to stay that way.” “Be glad you’re even alive.” “Be furious you’re going to die.