He had to start at the top and work his way down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning.

That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance.

Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off.

The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.

22 love most is precisely what, from the Flaubertian

He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

He had opposed his daughter’s marriage to Colonel Moodus because he disliked attending weddings.

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?

Kraft was a skinny, harmless kid from Pennsylvania who wanted only to be liked, and was destined to be disappointed in even so humble and degrading an ambition.