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Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective.

Joseph Heller

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Joseph Heller
Age: 76 †
Born: 1923
Born: May 1
Died: 1999
Died: December 10
Autobiographer
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Letter
Passed
Letters
Adverb
Went
Adverbs
Death
Adjective
Hands
Adjectives
Every
Declared

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I can't start writing until I have a closing line.
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It is the anonymous they, the enigmatic they who are in charge. Who is they? I don't know. Nobody knows. Not even they themselves.
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Everybody is as unstable as water.
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The promises of maniacs, like those of women, are not safely relied upon.
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where are the snowdens of yesteryear?
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What do you do when it rains? The captain answered frankly. I get wet.
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When people disagreed with him he urged them to be objective.
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He was sick with lust and mesmerized with regret
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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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Under Colonel Korn's rule, the only people permitted to ask questions were those who never did.
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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?
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The enemy, retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, 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.
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It's a wise person, I guess, who knows he's dumb, and an honest person who knows he's a liar. And it's a dumb person, I guess, whose convinced he's wise...-Bob Slocum
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For war there is always enough. It's peace that's expensive.
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I had examined myself pretty thoroughly and discovered that I was unfit for military service.
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Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about.
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Gold was not altogether certain what, anatomically, a gorge was, but he knew that his was rising.
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Now you've given them hope, and they're unhappy. So the blame is all yours.
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If Richard Nixon was second-rate, what in the world is third-rate?
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The body stores the trauma of our lives in muscular rigidity, thereby keeping us stuck in the past. When we release the tension in the body and align ourselves with gravity, we take a new stand in life. This allows us to be at ease with ourselves and in harmony in our relationship to others and to our planet.
Joseph Heller