Catch-22 Quotes - Page 3 | Just Great DataBase

Why, swore Yossarian at him approvingly, you evil-eyed, mechanicallyaptituded, disaffiliated son of a bitch, did you walk around with anything in your cheeks?

It's only that I feel an injustice has been committed. Why should I have somebody else's malaria and you have my dose of clap?

You just came out of the hospital ten days ago, Milo reminded him reprovingly. You can’t keep running into the hospital every time something happens you don’t like. No, the best thing to do is fly the missions. It’s our duty.

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!

The Texan wanted everybody in the ward to be happy but Yossarian and Dunbar. He was really very sick.

Men, Colonel Cargill began in Yossarian’s squadron, measuring his pauses carefully. You’re American officers. The officers of no other army in the world can make that statement. Think about it.

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.

Everywhere he looked was a nut, and it was all a sensible young gentleman like himself could do to maintain his perspective amid so much madness. And it was urgent that he did, for he knew his life was in peril.

You have a morbid aversion to dying.

Opportunity only knocks once in this world, he would say. Major Major’s father repeated this good joke at every opportunity.

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.

When people disagreed with him, he urged them to be objective.

Why are they going to disappear him? I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?

They couldn’t touch him because he was Tarzan, Mandrake, Flash Gordon. He was Bill Shakespeare. He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees.

One hand washes the other. Know what I mean? You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Yossarian knew what he meant. That’s not what I meant, Doc Daneeka said as Yossarian began scratching his back.

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.

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.

Well, maybe it's true," Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. "Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions to make it seem long. But in that event, who wants one?" "I do" Dunbar told him. "why?" Clevinger asked. "What else is there?

He felt imprisoned in an airplane. In an airplane there was absolutely no place in the world to go except to another part of the airplane.

In the morning he stepped from his tent looking haggard, fearful and guilt-ridden, an eaten shell of a human building rocking perilously on the brink of collapse.

Major de Coverley is a noble and wonderful person, and everyone admires him.''He's a silly old fool who really has no right acting like a silly young fool. Where is he today? Dead?

Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity by this clause of Catch-22 and let a respectful whistle. 'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed.'It's the best there is,' agreed Doc Daneeka.

Fortunately, just when things were blackest, the war broke out.

It was miraculous. Each day he faced was another dangerous mission against mortality. And he had been surviving them for twenty-eight years.

Adolf Hitler, who had done such a great job of combating un-American activities in Germany.

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?

A situation in which a desired outcome or solution is impossible to attain because of a set of inherently illogical rules or conditions.

Bureaucracy, as Hannah Arendt defined it: the rule of nobody. Roll

Superman?’ Clevinger cried. ‘Superman?’ ‘Supraman,’ Yossarian corrected.

I had the strongest trade association in the world backing me up.

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.

One of the things he wanted to start screaming about was the surgeon’s knife that was almost certain to be waiting for him and everyone else who lived long enough to die.

You're the new squadron commander,' Colonel Cathcart had shouted rudely across the railroad ditch to him. 'But don't think it means anything, because it doesn't. All it means is that you're the new squadron commander.

Well, maybe it is true," Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subded tone. "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?

How did I get here? Somebody pushed me. Somebody must have set me off in this direction and clusters of other hands must have touched themselves to the controls at various times, for I would not have picked this way for the world.

Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.

The spirit gone, man is garbage.

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.

It takes brains not to make money, Colonel Cargill wrote in one of the homiletic memoranda he regularly prepared for circulation over General Peckem’s signature. Any fool can make money these days and most of them do. But what about people with talent and brains? Name, for example, one poet who makes money.

Dunbar was lying motionless on his back again with his eyes staring up at the ceiling like a doll’s. He was working hard at increasing his life span. He did it by cultivating boredom. Dunbar was working so hard at increasing his life span that Yossarian thought he was dead.

In a way the C.I.D. man was pretty lucky, because outside the hospital the war was still going on. Men went mad and were rewarded with medals.

Actually, he was a very warm, compassionate man who never stopped feeling sorry for himself.Why me? was his constant lament, and the question was a good one.

He was generally disappointed by the new novels of the early postwar years: There was a terrible sameness about books being published and I almost stopped reading as well as writing.

There was not enough of the patient to go around, and specialists pushed forward in line with raw tempers and snapped at their colleagues in front to hurry up and give somebody else a chance.

The more loyalty oaths a person signed, the more loyal he was; to Captain Black it was as simple as that, and he had Corporal Kolodny sign hundreds with his name each day so that he could always prove he was more loyal than anyone else.