One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Quotes

“He hadn't let what he looked like run his life one way or the other, any more than he'd let the Combine mill him into fitting where they wanted him to fit.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“she likes a rigged game.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“But the new guy is different, and the Acutes can see it, different from anybody been coming on this ward for the past ten years, different from anybody they ever met outside. He's just as vulnerable, maybe, but the Combine didn't get him.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“The Big Nurse is able to set the wall clock at whatever speed she wants by just turning one of those dials in the steel door; she takes a notion to hurry things up, she turns the speed up, and those hands whip around that disk like spokes in a wheel. The scene in the picture-screen windows goes through rapid changes of light to show morning, noon, and night - throb off and on furiously with day and dark, and everybody is driven like mad to keep up with that passing of fake time; awful scramble of shaves and breakfasts and appointments and lunches and medications and ten minutes of night so you barely get your eyes closed before the dorm light's screaming at you to get up and start the scramble again, go like a sonofabitch this way, going through the full schedule of a day maybe twenty times an hour, till the Big Nurse sees everybody is right up to the breaking point, and she slacks off on the throttle, eases off the pace on that clock-dial, like some kid been fooling with the moving-picture projection machine and finally got tired watching the film run at ten times its natural speed, got bored with all that silly scampering and insect squeak of talk and turned it back to normal.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“I'd wander for days in the fog, scared I'd never see another thing, then there'd be that door, opening to show me the mattress padding on the other side to stop out the sounds, the men standing in a line like zombies among shiny copper wires and tubes pulsing light, and the bright scrape of arcing electricity. I'd take my place in the line and wait my turn at the table. The table shaped like a cross, with shadows of a thousand murdered men printed on it, silhouette wrists and ankles running under leather straps sweated green with use, a silhouette neck and head running up to a silver band goes across the forehead. And a technician at the controls beside the table looking up from his dial and down the line and pointing at me with a rubber glove.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“I'm accustomed to being top man. I been a bull goose catskinner for every gyppo logging operation in the Northwest and bull goose gambler all the way from Korea, was even bull goose pea weeder on that pea farm at Pendleton -- so I figure if I'm bound to be a loony, then I'm bound to be a stompdown dadgum good one.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

“He’s like an old clock the won’t tell time but won’t stop neither with the hands bend out of shape and the face bare of numbers and the alarm rusted silent, an old worthless clock that keeps ticking and cuckooing without meaning nothing.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“It’s still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

“He's what he is, that's it. Maybe that makes him strong enough, being what he is.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“It's fall coming, I kept thinking, fall coming; just like that was the strangest thing ever happened. Fall. Right outside here it was spring a while back, then it was summer, and now it's fall-that's sure a curious idea.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“Does the Spearmint lose its flavor on the bedpost over night?”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

“Billy here has been talkin' about slicin' his wrists again, so is there seven of you guys who'd like to join him and make it therapeutic?”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“I see he had his shorts on under the towel all along.
I think for a fact that she'd rather he'd of been stark naked under that towel than had on those shorts. She's glaring at those big white whales leaping round on his shorts in pure wordless outrage.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“I was actually going out of the hospital with two whores on a fishing boat; I had to keep saying it over and over to myself to believe it.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“...I think apparatus burned out all over the ward trying to adjust to her come busting in like she did-took electronic readings on her and calculated they weren't built to handle something like this on the ward, and just burned out, like machines committing suicide.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“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.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“Papa says if you don’t watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

“He who- what was it?- walks out of step, hears another drum”
― Ken Kesey (Author), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“She was fifteen years old, going on thirty-five, Doc, and she told me she was eighteen, she was very willing, I practically had to take to sewing my pants shut. Between you and me, uh, she might have been fifteen, but when you get that little red beaver right up there in front of you, I don't think it's crazy at all and I don't think you do either. No man alive could resist that, and that's why I got into jail to begin with. And now they're telling me I'm crazy over here because I don't sit there like a goddamn vegetable. Don't make a bit of sense to me. If that's what being crazy is, then I'm senseless, out of it, gone-down-the-road, wacko. But no more, no less, that's it.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“Out along the dim six-o’clock street, I saw leafless trees standing, striking the sidewalk there like wooden lightning, concrete split apart where they hit, all in a fenced-in ring. An iron line of pickets stuck out of the ground along the front of a tangleweed yard, and on back was a big frame house with a porch, leaning a rickety shoulder hard into the wind so’s not to be sent tumbling away a couple of blocks like an empty cardboard grocery box.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“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.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“Most merciful God, accept these two poor sinners into your arms. And keep the doors ajar for
the coming of the rest of us, because you are witnessing the end, the absolute, irrevocable, fantastic
end. I’ve finally realized what is happening. It is our last fling. We are doomed henceforth. Must
screw our courage to the sticking point and face up to our impending fate. We [255] shall be all of us
shot at dawn. One hundred cc’s apiece. Miss Ratched shall line us all against the wall, where we,,,
face the terrible maw of a muzzle-loading shotgun which she has loaded with Miltowns! Thorazines!
Libriums! Stelazines! And with a wave of her sword, blooie! Tranquilize all of us completely out of
existence.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“The game goes round and round, to the rattle of dice and the shuffle of play money.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“The way I remember it the tribe got paid some huge amount."
"That's what they said to him. He said, What can you pay for the way a man lives? He said, What can you pay for the way a man is? They didn't understand.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“Okay, stand outa the way. Sometimes when I go to exertin' myself I use up all the air nearby and grown men faint from suffocation. Stand back. There's liable to be crackin' cement and flying steel. Get the women and kids someplace safe. Stand back. . . .”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“Okay, stand outa the way. Sometimes when I go to exertin' myself I use up all the air nearby and grown men faint from suffocation.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“She asked if we were calm enough for her to take off the cuffs, and McMurphy nodded. He had slumped over with his head hung and his elbows between his knees and looked completely exhausted--it hadn't occurred to me that it was just as hard for him to stand straight as it was for me.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“I'd give something to see that. Mostly, I'd just to look over the country around the gorge again, just to bring some of it clear in my mind again.

I been away a long time.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“turns me on so loud it's like no sound, everybody yelling at me hands over their ears from behind a glass wall, faces working around in talk circles but no sound from the mouths. my sound soaks up all other sound.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“Juicy fruit”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest