If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that he wanted to smash his pale. sad, sickly face with his fist and knock him out of existence

In short, he was a dope. He often looked to Yossarian like one of those people hanging around modern museums with both eyes together on one side of a face. It was an illusion, of course, generated by...

All through the night, men looked at the sky and were saddened by the stars.

Weddings, I began to understand, were vile, filthy things when they ran amuck.

Books are to me as homemade tattoos are to an inmate. Can't get enough of them.

...all members of Congress should be required wear NASCAR uniforms. You know, the kind with the patches? That way we'd know who is sponsoring each of them. I think he was kidding; they'd never be able...

I am something of a connoisseur of the country pile and I must say {he} had done himself remarkably well. At a guess I would say it was from the reign of Queen Anne and had been bunged up by some...

The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they might be related to one another in ways frowned on by the Old Testament.

Don't you make fun of me or my children! Some babies are premature. Mine were all postmature. That's why they're so smart. Their brains had longer to develop.

Hip - Someone who knows the score. Someone who understands jive talk. Someone who is with it. The expression is not subject to definition because, if you don't dig what it means, no one can ever tell...

He opened the first letter, No "Dear Mr. Woods." It was a page full of profanities. There was something oddly refreshing about honest, to-the-point hate mail. No hypocrisy and forced politeness. Too...

If the Lord hasn't got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that's his business.

... zebra crossings were rather like Bosnia's "safe zones": places where, if you die, you may simply die with the knowledge that your killer was in the wrong.

If the front door is opened, Barris said, during our absence, my cassette tape recorder starts recording. It's under the couch. It has a two-hour tape. I placed three omnidirectional Sony mikes at...

I did not tell Fat this, but technically he had become a Buddha. It did not seem to me like a good idea to let him know. After all, if you are a Buddha you should be able to figure it out for...

No single thing abides; and all things are fucked up.

It was time for tea as it so often was.

Remember the Hottentots? asked James. They've become the Khoi now, which means that the Germans will have to retire that wonderful word of theirs, Hottentotenpotentatenstantenattentater, which means,...

Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.

What the hell was your pal Bertin demanding? he asked. Sipping syrup?...

The thing about Botox is that when you've had too much, you then have to fake reactions just to look human--and it's impossible to distinguish real fake reactions from fake fake reactions.