"I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long."
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Quote collection
Joseph Heller quotes (page 1 of 8)
155 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character."
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"where are the snowdens of yesteryear?"
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"When I grow up I want to be a little boy."
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"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 Frome 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?"
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"Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all. I'm cold,' Snowden said. 'I'm cold."
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"Every writer I know has trouble writing."
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"The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them."
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"History was a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind. Surely, Watt with his steam engine, Faraday with his electric motor, and Edison with his incandescent light bulb did not have it as their goal to contribute to a fuel shortage some day that would place their countries at the mercy of Arab oil."
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"[They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything."
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"Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it."
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"But how can one be warm alone?"
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"He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody."
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"You know, that might be the answer - to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail."
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"The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him."
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"What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for."
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"...[A]nything worth dying for ... is certainly worth living for."
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"The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on."
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"In the long run, failure was the only thing that worked predictably. All else was accidental."
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"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."
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