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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.

What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you squarely in the eye and said he would rather die than be killed in combat

If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order to survive, to protect some aspect of myself that was now in constant retreat.

Havermeyer was a lead bombardier who never missed. Yossarian was a lead bombardier who had been demoted because he no longer gave a damn whether he missed or not. He had decided to live forever or die...

Why are they going to disappear him? I don't know. It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?

We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.

Read me back the last line. 'Read me back the last line,' read back the corporal who could take shorthand. Not my last line, stupid! the colonel shouted. Somebody else's. 'Read me back the last line,'...

Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great. We are talking of only a painting.

the full fury of his storming countenance with its rugged overhang of gullied forehead and huge crag of a humpbacked nose that came charging out of his face wrathfully like a Big Ten fullback.

Inscribed on the back was a line from Virgil in Latin: Audentes fortuna juvat. Fortune favors the bold. He'd been bold all right, but Fortune hadn't gotten the memo.

It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?

Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the ones who had taken it away--become afraid, more protective of their endangered interests, more...

It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian say the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.

Everyone was always very friendly toward him, and no one was ever very nice; everyone spoke to him, and no one ever said anything.

His goading remained gentle. Rome was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you really think...

The rain was pattering hypnotically on the plane's exterior.

The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likeable. In three days no one could stand him.

If you run into trouble, just tell everybody that the security of the country requires a strong domestic Egyptian-cotton speculating industry.

When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me, I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end.

Memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved...

It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.

You ask me what it means to be irrelevant? The feeling is akin to visiting your old house as a wandering ghost with unfinished business. Imagine going back: the structure is familiar ,but the door is...

i could have told him to learn from Gatsby. from the lonely, isolated Gatsby, who also tried to retrieve his past and give flash and blood to a fancy, a dream that was never meant to be more than a...

I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the...

A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic - not that it advocates...

I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly deserted rooms, abandoned houses and discarded photographs of women. Gradually, her work became more...

With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.

A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and...

You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because...

The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection. Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities,...

It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else's shoes and understand the other's different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere...

I told them this novel was an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel. There were other contenders: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter. Some...

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.