Quotes
"Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably.... It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all."
Properly speaking, man inhabits only his head and his heart. All other places are vainly before his eyes, at his sides, and under his feet: he himself is not there at all.
Man loves what is small; and he loves what is big, through the same weakness.
We are all old children, more or less serious, more or less filled with ourselves.
Now back to Malory.[…] As I go along, I am constantly jiggled by the arrant nonsense of a great deal of the material. A great deal of it makes no sense at all. Two thirds of it is the vain dreaming of children talking in the dark. And then when you are about to throw it out in disgust, you remember the Congressional Record or the Sacco and Vanzetti case or 'preventive war' or our national political platforms, or racial problems that can't be settled reasonably or domestic relations, or beatniks, and it is borne in on you that the world operates on nonsense — that it is a large part of the pattern and that knight errantry is no more crazy than our present-day group thinking, and activity. That is the way humans are. If you inspected them and their activities in the glass of reason, you would drown the whole lot.
He doesn't belong to a race clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live at peace with itself.
Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is — and a woman too, I guess.
No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
Does anyone ever know even the outer fringe of another? What are you like in there? Mary — do you hear? Who are you in there?
What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately.
And I feel that I am a man. And I feel that a man is a very important thing — maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed — because Thou mayest.
p. 302
We are no better than the animals; in fact in a lot of ways we aren't as good.
