Catch-22 Quotes

After he made up his mind to spend the rest of the war in the hospital, Yossarian wrote letters to everyone he knew saying that he was in the hospital but never mentioning why. One day he had a bet...

Catch-22 required that each censored letter bear the censoring officer's name. (1.12)

Then 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 than drifter...

Actually, the pain in his liver had gone away, but Yossarian didn't say anything and the doctors never suspected. (1.8)

They couldn't touch him [Yossarian] 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, S...

It was a monotonous job, and Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than the lives of officers. After the first day he had no curiosi...

[…] a stove exploded in the mess hall and set fire to one side of the kitchen…In about fifteen minutes the crash trucks from the airfield arrived to fight the fire. For a frantic half-h...

Aarfy was a dedicated fraternity man who loved cheerleading and class reunions and did not have brains enough to be afraid. Yossarian did have brains enough and was, and the only thing that stopped...

He coughed quietly, gingerly, and dabbed the pads slowly at his lips with a distaste that had become automatic. (1.99)

Nately had spent the last thirty-two hours at twenty dollars an hour with the apathetic whore he adored, and he had nothing left of his pay or of the lucrative allowance he received every month fro...

Behind him, men were dying. Strung out for miles in a stricken, torturous, squirming line, the other flights of planes were making the same hazardous journey over the target, threading their swift...

Women killed Hungry Joe. His response to them as sexual beings was one of frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of the miraculous, instruments of ple...