One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Quotes - Page 2 | Just Great DataBase

He's got hands so long and white and dainty I think they carved each other out of soap, and sometimes they get loose and glide around in front of him free as two white birds until he notices them and traps them between his knees; it bothers him that he's got pretty hands.

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?

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.

No one's ever dared come out and say it before, but there's not a man among us that doesn't think it, that doesn't feel just as you do about her and the whole business - feel it somewhere down deep in his scared little soul.

One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo's nest.

But, gee," the other nurse says, "what on earth would MAKE a man want to do something like disrupt the ward for, Miss Ratched? What possible motive...?""You seem to forget, MISS Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane.

It's the truth, even if it didn't happen.

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.

When I die pin me up against the sky.

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.

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.

I don't seem able to get it straight in my mind....

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.

Does the Spearmint lose its flavor on the bedpost over night?

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.

The game goes round and round, to the rattle of dice and the shuffle of play money.

What can you pay for the way a man lives? What can you pay for what a man is?

They are in contact on a high-voltage wavelength of hate...

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.

But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.

I can see the…seams where they’re put together. And, almost, see the apparatus inside them take the words I just said and try to fit the words in here and there, this place and that, and when they find the words don’t have any place ready-made where they’ll fit, the machinery disposes of the words like they weren’t even spoken.

I want to touch him because I'm one of these queers!

He’s got hands so long and white and dainty I think they carved each other out of soap.

But I remember one thing: it wasn't me that started acting deaf, it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.

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.

A bluetick hound bays out there in the fog, running scared and lost because he can’t see. No tracks on the ground but the one’s he’s making, and he sniffs in every direction with his cold red-rubber nose and picks up no scent but his own fear, fear burning down into him like steam.

It's the truth. Even if it didn't happen.

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.

I forget sometimes what laughter can do.

They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.

He's safe as long as he can laugh, he thinks, and it works pretty fair.

I will be a sonofabitch if he ain't in here at eleven-thirty at night, fartin' around in the dark with a pair of scissors and a paper sack.

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.

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.

It’s fall coming, I thought, I can smell that sour-molasses smell of silage, clanging the air like a bell – smell like somebody’s been burning oak leaves, left them to smolder overnight because they’re too green.

She walked right on past, ignoring him just like she chose to ignore the way nature had tagged her with those outsized badges of femininity, just like she was above him, and sex, and everything else that’s weak and of the flesh.

If somebody'd of come in and took a look, men watching a blank TV, a fifty-year old woman hollering and squealing at the back of their heads about discipline and order and recriminations, they'd of thought the whole bunch was crazy as loons.

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.

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. . . .

What the Chronics are—or most of us—are machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot.

But like always when I try to place my thoughts in the past and hide there, the fear close at hand seeps in through the memory.

If you’ll curtail your literary pursuits a moment I’ll introduce you to my counterpart and Nemesis; I would be trite and say, ‘to my better half,’ but I think that phrase indicates some kind of basically equal division, don’t you?

I've heard that theory of the Therapeutic Community enough times to repeat it forwards and backwards - how a guy has to learn to get along in a group before he'll be able to function in a normal society; how the group can help the guy by showing him where he's out of place; how society is what decides who's sane and who isn't, so you got to measure up.

The walls are white as the white suits, polished clean as a refrigerator door, and the black face and hands seem to float against it like a ghost.

While his relaxed, good-natured voice doled out his life for us to live a rollicking past full of kid fun and drinking buddies and loving women and barroom battles over meager honors-for all of us to dream ourselves into.

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.

What makes people so impatient is what I can’t figure; all the guy had to do was wait.

My friend, that, as anyone can see, is not a hotel; it's a depot.

The more he tries to stop it, the faster it goes. When he lets his hands and face move like they want to and doesn’t try to hold them back, they flow and gesture in a way that’s real pretty to watch, but when he worries about them and tries to hold back he becomes a wild, jerky puppet doing a high-strung dance. Everything is moving faster and faster, and his voice is speeding up to match.

Mostly, I'd just like 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.