Captured Catch-22

The following come from Joseph Heller's brilliant Catch-22, which everyone with a sense of irony and humor and mortality must read:

"Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than the lives of officers."

". . . there was the educated Texan from Texas who looked like someone in Technicolor and felt, patriotically, that people of means--decent folk--should be given more votes tan drifters, crminals, degenerates, atheists and indencent folk--people without means."

"There's no patriotism, that's what it is. And no matriotism, either."

Of their squadron, the 256th, Yossarian explains: "That's two to the fighting either power . . . if you're thinking of writing a symbolic poem about our squadron."

"Insanity is contagious."

". . . outside the hospital the war was still going on. Men went mad and were rewarded with medals."

". . . (Colonel Cargill) was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody."

"You're American officers. The officers of no other army in teh world can make that statement. Think about it."

"Yossarian . . . had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive."

"The Pacific Ocean was a body of water surrounded on all sides by elephantiasis and other dread diseases to which, if (Doc Daneeka) ever displeased Colonel Cathcart by grounding Yossarian, he might suddenly find himself transferred."

"Group Headquarters was alarmed, for there was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to."

"'Do You know how long a year takes when it's going away?' Dunbar repeated to Clevinger. 'This long,' he snapped his fingers. 'A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air. Today you're an old man . . . A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! The go rocketing by so fast . . .'"

"There was only one catcth and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind . . ."

"Yossarian saw (Catch-22) clearly in all its spinning reasonableness. There was an illiptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn't quite sure that he saw it all, just the way he was never quite sure about good modern art . . ."

"Aarfy was a dedicated fraternity man who loved cheerleading and class reunions and did not have brains enough to be afraid."

"Hungry Joe was a throbbing, ragged mass of motile irritability. The steady ticking of a watch in a quiet room crashed like torture against his unshielded brain."

"Women killed Hungry Joe. His response to them as sexual beings was on of frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of the miraculous, instruments of pleasure too pwerful to be measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for use by base, unworthy man. He could interpret their naked presence in his hands only as a cosmic oversight detsined to be rectified speedily, and he was driven always to make what carnal use of them he could in the fleeting moment or two he felt he had before Someone caught wise and whisked them away."

"Impressionalbe men inthe squadron like Dobbs and Captain Flume were so deeply disturbed by Hungry Joe's shrieking nightmares that they would begin to have nightmares of their own, and the piercing obscenities they flung into the air every night from their separate places in the squadron ran against each other in the darkness romantically like the mating calls of songbirds with filthy minds."

"Instead of being liked, (Kraft) was dead, a bleeding cincer on the barbarous pile whom nobody had heard in those last precious moments while the plane with one wing plummeted."

"McWatt was the craziest combat man of them all probably, becaus he was perfectly sane and still did not mind the war."

". . . It was a vile and muddy war, and Yossarian could have lived without it--lived forever, perhaps. Only a fraction of his countrymen would vie up their lives to win it, and it was not his ambition to be among them . . . History did not demand Yossarian's premature demise, just cie could be satisfied without it, progress did not hinge up i, victory did not dpeend 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."

"(Clevinger) was a militant idealist who crusaded against racial bigotry by growing faint in its presence. He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it."

"Lieutenant Scheisskopf was an ROTC graduate who was rather glad that war had broken out, since it gave him an opportunity to wear an officer's uniform every day and say 'Men' in a clipped, military voice to the bunches of kids who fell into his clutches every eight weeks on their way to the butcher's block."

"Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskopf had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times."

"To Yossarian, the idea of pennants as prizes (for marching) was absurd. NO money went with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else."

"I'll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning. Garroting. That's what justice is . . . From the hip . . ."

"Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism."

"At the state university, (Major Major) too his studies so seriously that he was suspected by the homosexuals of being a Communist and suspected by the Communists of being a homosexual."

"General Peckem's communications about cleanliness and procrastination made Major Major feel like a filthy procrastinator, and he always got hose out of the way as quickly as he could."

"Major Major had lied, and it was good. He was not really surprised that it was good, for he had observed that people who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did not lie."

"Mudd was the unknown soldier who had never had a chance, for that was the only thing anyone ever did know about all the unknown soldiers--they never had a chance."

"Without realizing how it had come about, the combat men in the squadron discovered themselves dominated by the administrators appointed to serve them."

"It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead."

"The enemy...is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don't you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live."

"(Yossarian) stepped into the briefing room with mixed emotions, uncertain how he was supposed to feel about Kraft and the others, for they had all died in the distance of a mute and secluded agony at a moment when he was up to his own ass in the same vile, excruciating dilemma of duty and damnation."