“The captain was a good chess player, and the games were always interesting. Yossarian had stopped playing chess with him because the games were so interesting they were foolish.”

“Ralph... would treat the day's decisions as though he were playing chess. The only trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player.”

“I don't know how to play chess, but to me, life is like a game of chess.”

“A good player who loses at chess is genuinely convinced hat he has lost because of a mistake, and he looks for this mistake in the beginning of his game, but forgets that there were also mistakes at ever step in the course of the game, that none of his moves was perfect. The mistake he pays attention to is conspicuous only because his opponent took advantage of it.”

“The reason I like the game chess is because each move has countless repercussions, but you're in charge of them. And it's your ability to see into the future and the effects of the decisions you've made that males you either a good or not a good chess player. It's not luck.”

“I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.”