Catch-22 Lies and Deceit Quotes

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

It was a harsh and stunning realization that was forced upon him at so tender an age, the realization that he was not, as he had always been led to believe, Caleb Major, but instead was some total stranger named Major Major Major about whom he knew absolutely nothing and about whom nobody else had ever heard before. What playmates he had withdrew from him and never returned, disposed, as they were, to distrust all strangers, especially one who had already deceived them by pretending to be someone they had known for years. (9.13)

[…] people who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did not lie. (9.116)

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, a man who was at least as mature and intelligent as you were and who you had to pretend was not? What could you say to him? (9.205)

Yossarian […] continued searching intently, cold with a compassionate kind of fear now for the little bouncy and bizarre buck-toothed tentmate who had smashed Appleby's forehead open with a Ping-Pong racket and who was scaring the daylights out of Yossarian once again. (15.47)

[…] but even that idyll had ended on a tragic note: he was still in good health when the quarantine period was over, and they told him again that he had to get out and go to war. Yossarian sat up in bed when he heard the bad news and shouted,

"I see everything twice." (18.51-52)

All Colonel Cathcart knew about his house in the hills was that he had such a house and hated it. He was never so bored as when spending there the two or three days every other week necessary to sustain the illusion that his damp and drafty stone farmhouse in the hills was a golden palace of carnal delights. Officers' clubs everywhere pulsated with blurred but knowing accounts of lavish, hushed-up drinking and sex orgies there and of secret, intimate nights of ecstasy with the most beautiful, the most tantalizing, the most readily aroused and most easily satisfied Italian courtesans, film actresses, models and countesses. No such private nights of ecstasy or hushed-up drinking and sex orgies ever occurred. (21.8)

"Why isn't he wearing clothes?" General Dreedle demanded…

"Why isn't he wearing clothes?" Colonel Korn demanded of Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren.

"A man was killed in his plane over Avignon last week and bled all over him," Captain Wren replied. "He swears he's never going to wear a uniform again."

"A man was killed in his plane over Avignon last week and bled all over him," Captain Korn (sic) reported directly to General Dreedle. "His uniform hasn't come back from the laundry yet." (21.47-52)

[Yossarian:] "Nothing would please me more than to have the son a b**** [Cathcart] break his neck or get killed in a crash or to find out that someone else had shot him to death. But I don't think I could kill him."

"He'd do it to you," Dobbs argued. "In fact, you're the one who told me he is doing it to us by keeping us in combat so long."

"But I don't think I could do it to him. He's got a right to live, too, I guess." (22.19-21)

Milo turned to him [Yossarian] with a faint glimmer of mischief. "I have a sure-fire plan of cheating the federal government out of six thousand dollars. We can make three thousand dollars apiece without any risk to either of us. Are you interested?"

"No."

Milo looked at Yossarian with profound emotion. "That's what I like about you," he exclaimed. "You're honest! You're the only one I know that I can really trust." (22.73-75)

"You see? Imagine a man his age risking what little life he has left for something so absurd as a country!" he declared.

Nately was instantly up in arms again. "There is nothing so absurd about risking your life for your country!" he declared.

"Isn't there?" asked the old man. "What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for."

"Anything worth living for," said Nately, "is worth dying for." (23.54-57)

[Milo:] "Look, I didn't start this war, Yossarian […] I'm just trying to put it on a businesslike basis. Is anything wrong with that? You know, a thousand dollars ain't such a bad price for a medium bomber and a crew. If I can persuade the Germans to pay me a thousand dollars for every plane they shoot down, why shouldn't I take it?

"Because you're dealing with the enemy, that's why. Can't you understand that we're fighting a war? People are dying. Look around you, for Christ's sake!"

Milo shook his head with weary forbearance. "And the Germans are not our enemies," he declared. "Oh, I know what you're going to say. Sure we're at war with them. But the Germans are also members in good standing of the syndicate, and it's my job to protect their rights as shareholders […]. Don't you understand that I have to respect the sanctity of my contract with Germany?"

"No," Yossarian rebuffed him harshly. (24.52-55)

Milo's eyes were liquid with integrity, and his artless and uncorrupted face was lustrous with a shining mixture of sweat and insect repellent.

"Look at them," he explained in a voice choked with emotion. "They're my friends, my countrymen, my comrades in arms. A fellow never had a better bunch of buddies. Do you think I'd do a single thing to harm them if I didn't have to?" (24.56-57)

Doc Daneeka lost his head during Milo's bombardment; instead of running for cover, he had remained out in the open and performing his duty, slithering along the ground through shrapnel, strafing and incendiary bombs like a furtive, wily lizard from casualty to casualty, administering tourniquets, morphine, splints and sulfanilamide with a dark and doleful visage, never saying one word more than he had to and reading in each man's bluing wound a dreadful portent of his own decay. He worked himself relentlessly into exhaustion before the long night was over […] (24.70)

[…] the vision of the naked man in the tree […]. Was is a ghost, then? The dead man's soul? An angel from heaven or a minion from hell? Or was the whole fantastic episode merely the figment of a diseased imagination, his own, of a deteriorating mind, a rotting brain? The possibility that there really had been a naked man in the tree […] never crossed the chaplain's mind. (25.12)

[Aarfy:] "I can just imagine what your father and mother would say if they knew you were running around with filthy trollops like that one. Your father is a very distinguished man, you know."

"I'm not going to tell him," Nately declared with determination. "I'm not going to say a word about her to him or Mother until after we're married." (26.20-21)

Yossarian felt sorry for Orr. Orr was so small and ugly. Who would protect him if he lived? Who would protect a warmhearted, simple-minded gnome like Orr from rowdies and cliques and from expert athletes like Appleby who had flies in their eyes and would walk right over him with swaggering conceit and self-assurance every chance they got? (28.60)

"They [the villagers] won't even take shelter," Dunbar argued bitterly. "They'll pour out into the streets to wave when they see our planes coming, all the children and dogs and old people. Jesus Christ! Why can't we just leave them alone?"

"What can't we create the roadblock somewhere else?" asked McWatt. "Why must it be there?"

[…]

[Colonel Korn:] "Why don't you want to bomb the village?"

"It's cruel, that's why." (29.67-76)

[Sergeant Knight:] "Doc Daneeka's up there, too."

"I'm right here," contended Doc Daneeka, in a strange and troubled voice, darting an anxious look at Sergeant Knight. (30.38-39)

But to abandon Orr's tent would be to abandon Orr, who would have been spurned and humiliated clannishly by these four simple-minded officers waiting to move in. (32.10)