Joseph Heller Quotes on Death
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'Open your eyes, Clevinger. It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.'
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Clevinger was dead. That was the basic flaw in his philosophy.
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'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.'
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I hate God and I hate life. And the closer I come to death, the more I hate life.
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The wise man dies no better or more wisely than the fool. In what way, then, is the wise man wise?
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How dispiriting I find it, even after all my personal triumphs, that we must grow up and grow sad, that we must age, weaken, and in time go home to our long home in the ground, and that even golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust.
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The last thing any sensible human being should want is immortality. As it is, life lasts too long for most of us.
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God is a murderer, imagine that. I told you I had the best story in the Bible, didn't I? I have always known that He was. Sooner or later He murders us all, doesn't He, and we go back to the dust from which we came. So I'm no longer scared to defy him. All He can do is kill me.