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

— Joseph Heller

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.

— Joseph Heller

No such private nights of ecstasy or hushed-up drinking and sex orgies ever occurred. They might have occurred if either General Needle or General Pecked had once evinced an interest in taking part in orgies with him, but neither ever did, and the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him.

— Joseph Heller

Nurse Puckett found Yossarian wonderful and was already trying to change him.

— Joseph Heller

Oh well," Matt sang, "what the hell.

— 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 thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope.

— Joseph Heller

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!

— Joseph Heller

So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan From and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it then seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven?

— Joseph Heller

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon 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