Top 200 Joseph Heller Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Sinking invalids blew kisses to him from windows. Aproned shopkeepers cheered ecstatically from the narrow doorways of their shops. Tubas crumped. Here and there a person fell and was trampled to death.”

— Joseph Heller

202. “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 because he brought to mind all the pale, sad, sickly children in Italy that same night who needed haircuts and needed shoes and socks.”

— Joseph Heller

203. “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.”

— Joseph Heller

204. “When I learned you were sick, I finally felt old for the first time. You will recover, and I never will.”

— Joseph Heller

205. “Through the lavender gloom clouding the entrance of the operations tent, Yossarian glimpsed Chief White Halfoat, diligently embezzling whiskey rations, forging the signatures of nondrinkers and pouring off the alcohol with which he was poisoning himself into separate bottles rapidly in order to steal as much as he could before Captain Black roused himself with recollection and came hurrying over indolently to steal the rest himself.”

— Joseph Heller

206. “And between us now there is this continual underground struggle over something trivial and nebulous that won’t abate and has lasted nearly as long as the two of us have known each other. “I love you.”

— Joseph Heller

207. “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.”

— Joseph Heller

208. “You know, that’s my trouble,” he groaned. “I never listen to anybody. Somebody kept telling me to put my headlights on, but I just wouldn’t listen.”

— Joseph Heller

209. “He was a spry, suave and very precise general who knew the circumference of the equator and always wrote “enhanced” when he meant “increased.” He was a prick.”

— Joseph Heller

210. “I’m a regular supra man.”

— Joseph Heller

211. “Since he had nothing better to do well in, he did well in school.”

— Joseph Heller

212. “If you run into trouble, just tell everybody that the security of the country requires a strong domestic Egyptian-cotton speculating industry.”

— Joseph Heller

213. “Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great. We are talking of only a painting.”

— Joseph Heller

214. “Yossarian decided to change the subject. “Now you’re changing the subject.” he pointed out diplomatically. “I’ll bet I can name two things to be miserable about for every one you can name to be thankful for.”

— Joseph Heller

215. “Some Promised Land. The honey was there, but the milk we brought in with our goats. To people in California, God gives a magnificent coastline, a movie industry, and Beverly Hills. To us He gives sand. To Cannes He gives a plush film festival. We get the PLO. Our winters are rainy, our summers hot. To people who didn’t know how to wind a wristwatch He gives underground oceans of oil. To us He gives hernia, piles, and anti-Semitism.”

— Joseph Heller

216. “As soon as there was profit, there were people who wanted to make it, more than they wanted to make anything else.”

— Joseph Heller

217. “There was no way of really knowing anything, he knew, not even that there was no way of really knowing anything.”

— Joseph Heller

218. “My act of rebellion would be absorbed like rain on an ocean and leave no trace. I would not cause a ripple.”

— Joseph Heller

219. “And he knew something else as a social evolutionist that he might stress someday in his ‘Every Change Is for the Worse’ should he ever find time to write it: Gold knew that the most advanced and penultimate stage of a civilization was attained when chaos masqueraded as order, and he knew we were already there.”

— Joseph Heller

220. “Five is very good, Milo,” he observed with enthusiasm, spying a ray of hope. “That averages out to almost one combat mission every two months. And I’ll bet your total doesn’t even include the time you bombed us.” “Yes, sir. It does.”

— Joseph Heller

221. “He felt awkward because she was going to murder him.”

— Joseph Heller

222. “When salesmen are doing well, there is pressure upon them to begin doing better, for fear they may start doing worse.”

— Joseph Heller

223. “It’s a small wound. All we have to do is stop the bleeding, clean it out and put a few stitches in.” “But I’ve never had a chance to operate before. Which one is the scalpel? Is this one the scalpel?”

— Joseph Heller

224. “Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation?”

— Joseph Heller

225. “Now, where were we? Read me back the last line.” “ ‘Read me back the last line,’ ” read back the corporal who could take shorthand.”

— Joseph Heller

226. “Oh, don’t you worry about that,” Yossarian comforted him with a toneless snicker as the engines of the jeeps and ambulance fractured the drowsy silence and the vehicles in the rear began driving away backward.”

— Joseph Heller

227. “Even when he cheated he couldn’t win, because the people he cheated against were always better at cheating too.”

— Joseph Heller

228. “In fact, though the books came slowly, he was a novelist to his bootlaces, an avid narrator who couldn’t stop the story once it had started, who felt the terrors of existence so acutely that he had to tell them and tell them until he’d made them something else.”

— Joseph Heller

229. “All right, I’ll dance with you,” she said, before Yossarian could even speak. “But I won’t let you sleep with me.” “Who asked you?” Yossarian asked her. “You don’t want to sleep with me?” she exclaimed with surprise. “I don’t want to dance with you.”

— Joseph Heller

230. “One had to know Plato personally to appreciate the love he suppressed puritanically for the music, poetry, and drama he censured in his philosophy and censored in his model communities. They moved him too deeply.”

— Joseph Heller

231. “The steady ticking of a watch in a quiet room crashed like torture against his unshielded brain.”

— Joseph Heller

232. “I wonder what kind of person would come out if I ever did erase all my inhibitions at once, what kind of being is bottled up inside me now.”

— Joseph Heller

233. “Captain Black knew he was a subversive because he wore eyeglasses and used words like panacea and utopia, and because he disapproved of Adolf Hitler, who had done such a great job of combating unAmerican activities in Germany.”

— Joseph Heller

234. “How much older can you be at your age?”

— Joseph Heller

235. “Immediately next door to Yossarian was Havermeyer, who liked peanut brittle and lived all by himself in the two-man tent in which he shot tiny field mice every night with huge bullets from the .45 he had stolen from the dead man in Yossarian’s tent.”

— Joseph Heller

236. “As far as I know, I’m the only Captain Yossarian I know, but that’s only as far as I know.”

— Joseph Heller

237. “She listens to him with great intensity because she is paying no attention to him at all.”

— Joseph Heller

238. “Yossarian gorged himself in the mess hall until he thought he would explode and then sagged back in a contented stupor, his mouth filmy with a succulent residue.”

— Joseph Heller

239. “At the state university he took his studies so seriously that he was suspected by the homosexuals of being a Communist and suspected by the Communists of being a homosexual.”

— Joseph Heller

240. “Yossarian’s attitude towards his roommates turned merciful and protective at the mere recollection of Captain Black. It was not their fault that they were young and cheerful, he reminded himself as he carried the swinging beam of his flashlight back through the darkness. He wished that he could be young and cheerful, too. And it wasn’t their fault that they were courageous, confident and carefree.”

— Joseph Heller

241. “Why couldn’t anybody understand that he was not really a freak but a normal, lonely adult trying to lead a normal, lonely adult life?”

— Joseph Heller

242. “Can’t you stop by my tent on your way to the hospital and punch one of them in the nose for me?” he speculated aloud. “I’ve got four of them, and they’re going to crowd me out of my tent altogether.” “You know, something like that once happened to my whole tribe,” Chief White Halfoat remarked.”

— Joseph Heller

243. “She slept for eighteen hours, while Nately dashed about the apartment all the next morning shushing everybody in sight, and when she woke up she was deeply in love with him. In the last analysis, that was all it took to win her heart – a good night’s sleep.”

— Joseph Heller

244. “Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.”

— Joseph Heller