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Where were you born? On a battlefield, [Yossarian] answered. No, no. In what state were you born? In a state of innocence.

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
Battlefields
Answered
Innocence
State
Born
States
Battlefield

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Nately had a bad start. He came from a good family.
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Let's take a drive into the middle of nowhere with a packet of Marlboro lights and talk about our lives.
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What do you do when it rains? The captain answered frankly. I get wet.
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They couldn't keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady.
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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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He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
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If Richard Nixon was second-rate, what in the world is third-rate?
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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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I think in every country that there is at least one executive who is scared of going crazy.
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If character is destiny, the good are damned.
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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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The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.
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If God was dead, how could I feel this bad?
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I could not write about a subject sacred to me because I would be too flippant. Fortunately, there are no subjects sacred to me.
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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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When I grow up I want to be a little boy.
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When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as 'Catch-22' I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'
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Everybody is as unstable as water.
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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? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements?
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Insanity is contagious.
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