Joseph Heller Quotes

I came alone and I go as a stranger. I do not know who I am, nor what I have been doing.

I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

I do not know who I am tonight.

Maybe you are already lost and just do not know it.

Did you ever look in the mirror And see a stranger standing there? Did you ever drive for miles and miles And wonder how on earth you got yourself there?

Am I lost or just less found?

I am feeling fine. I remember these words and recite them. These are the things you say when asked how you are. After all, it would be odd to say: I'm not feeling. Or, more to the point: I'm not, I have ceased to be. Where am I?

I am not a man. I am not a human being inside. I am not that. I don't know what I am, but I am not that.

There have been times that I have found myself in places, and I don't know how I got there, and I don't actually know where I am.

I'm not usually where I think I am. It's kind of spooky.

I just don't know where my head is sometimes.

For quite some time, I lost my way, not only business-wise but personally.

I don't even recognize myself sometimes.

Nothing made sense to me anymore. I knew I was young, I knew I was small. But I was worried that I might already be ruined.

Time is just a blur for me. I don't know what - I don't even know where I am sometimes.

..and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didnt know who I was

You can know the whole world and still feel lost in it.

Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory, Pausing, gazing, bending, and stopping

In all earnestness I asked myself what kind of world I had stumbled into.

God knows what lives in me in place of me.

I can’t imagine what my school friends must have thought was going on because I was wandering around in some kind of dream. I felt as though my insides had been taken out which is, I now realize, the right feeling.

You wonder what I am doing? Well, so do I, in truth. Days seem to dawn, suns to shine, evenings to follow, and then I sleep. What I have done, what I am doing, what I am going to do, puzzle and bewilder me. Have you ever been a leaf and fallen from your tree in autumn and been really puzzled about it? That’s the feeling.

You described the feeling you’d always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn’t worry quite so much about why.

There appear to be no integrating forces, no unified meaning, no true inner understanding of phenomena in our experience of the world. Experts can explain anything in the objective world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In short, we live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.