One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

by Ken Kesey

so big I can smell the machinery inside the way you smell a motor pulling too big a load.

just like she’s got a man folded up inside that yellow paper and can pass him on to be looked over.

Pete had looked out first and seen all the delivery-room machinery waiting for him and somehow realized what he was being born into, and had grabbed on to everything handy in there to try to stave off being born.

I’m tired. I’m tired out talking and standing up. I been dead fifty-five years.”

He had come to life for maybe a minute to try to tell us something, something none of us cared to listen to or tried to understand, and the effort had drained him dry.

We must learn to accept it as a law of the natural world. The rabbits accept their role in the ritual and recognize the wolf as the strong.

I

But if they don’t exist, how can a man see them?

I forget sometimes what laughter can do.

Nobody complains about all the fog. I know why, now: as bad as it is, you can slip back in it and feel safe. That’s what McMurphy can’t understand, us wanting to be safe. He keeps trying to drag us out of the fog, out in the open where we’d be easy to get at.

You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself.

I thought I’d got over seeing those things and fretting over them. There’s no sense in it. There’s nothing to be done.

I’d think he was strong enough being his own self that he would never back down the way she was hoping he would.

He’s what he is, that’s it. Maybe that makes him strong enough, being what he is.

I’d take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.

It don’t seem like I ever been me. How can McMurphy be what he is?

He hadn’t let what he looked like run his life one way or the other,

A window was up, and the air in the dorm was clear and had a taste to it made me feel kind of giddy and drunk, gave me this sudden yen to get up out of bed and do something.

The moon was low in the sky over the pasture-land; the face of it was scarred and scuffed where it had just torn up out of the snarl of scrub oak and madrone trees on the horizon.

All I know is this: nobody’s very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.

while the technician enjoyed his toy.

Technology can never be only for good. It allows humans to explore every facet of the wold and tgeir minds, even the most destructive parts

aplomb.”

I still heard that sound my heart had knocked ringing in my head,

I gripped down on the arm of my chair and waited, scared it would happen, and, I began to realize, just a little scared it wouldn’t.

What can you pay for the way a man lives? He said, What can you pay for what a man is? They didn’t understand.

Inniuns ain’t able to write.”

Everyone is racist

old guys welded in wheelchairs for years, with catheters down their legs like vines rooting them for the rest of their lives right where they are,

Peeing is freedom

The doctor’s lying made us feel worse than ever—not because of the lie, so much, but because of the truth.

I was wondering a little if maybe he was blind to the other side, if maybe he wasn’t able to see what it was that parched laughter deep inside your stomach. Maybe the guys weren’t able to see it either, just feel the pressures of the different beams and frequencies coming from all directions, working to push and bend you one way or another, feel the Combine at work—but

I was feeling better than I’d remembered feeling since I was a kid, when everything was good and the land was still singing kids’ poetry to me.