Joseph Heller Quotes

Fear was the knowledge of pain, the awareness that you could be hurt, that you could die.

Already Roland feels his limbs starting to go numb. He swallows hard. "I hate this. I hate you. I hate all of you." "I understand.

Life seems like a haunted wood, where we tremble and crouch and cry.

I am one of the haunted.

What do you do?' she asks, holding out the vest. 'What do you do?' 'What do you do?' she asks, her voice shaking. 'Don't ask me, please. Okay, Clay?' 'Why not?' She sits on the mattress after I get up. Muriel screams. 'Because... I don't know,' she sighs. I look at her and don't feel anything and walk out with my vest.

My breathing slowed. I shaded her thick chestnut hair resting in a smooth curve against her face, a large bruise blazing across her cheek. I paused, looking over my shoulder to make certain I was alone. I drew her eye makeup, smudged by tears. In her watery eyes I drew the reflection of the commander, standing in front of her, his fist clenched. I continued to sketch, exhaled, and shook out my hands.

In this one terrified moment, my mind couldn’t focus on any of it. “I’ve forgotten everything.” “No, you haven’t.” His voice in the darkness was calm and reassuring. He smoothed back my hair and pressed one of those half kisses to my forehead. “Just relax and focus." “His reasonable words centered me and allowed the gears of logic that ran my life to take over again.

I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe.

I drag myself out of nightmares each morning and find there's no relief in waking.

He sobbed in desperation at the burden of fear he carried with him every day of his life.

Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.

For some, healing is too much to bear, and they hand it back, exchanging it for the fear they are accustomed to.

Blues fallin' down like hail And the day keeps on worryin' me There's a hell hound on my trail.

I'd just as soon freeze to death.

I'm afraid my voice is going to break. I am afraid she is going to hear how much this hurts.

Fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.

Despair often breeds disease.

The pain of powerlessness is excruciating. It is the most painful experience in the earth school, and everyone shares it.

There's something universal about illness... Whether you like it, at some level all patients are saying, 'Daddy, Mommy, help me, tell me it's going to be alright.'

My first fear was about the devil, when I was around fire, something I saw in a movie. I think it's about pain, in whichever form it comes. I had a lot of energy as a child - sometimes too much - and I didn't know how to channel it. It was making me suffer. It was bigger than myself, and I was very young.

Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause.

I spent four days and four nights just covered in blood, falling in the water.

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

I had my bully, and it was excruciating. Not only the bully, but the intimidation I felt.

Latin Americans hold on tight even to pain and suffering, preferring a certain present to an uncertain future. Some of this is only natural, entirely human. But for us, the fear is paralyzing; it generates not only anxiety but also paralysis.