Quotes - Page 172 | Just Great DataBase

There was times that week when I’d hear that full-throttled laugh, watch [McMurphy] scratching his belly and stretching and yawning and leaning back to wink at whoever he was joking with, everything coming to him just as natural as drawing breath, and I’d quit worrying about the Big Nurse and the Combine behind her. I’d think he was strong enough being his own self that he would never back down the way she was hoping he would. I’d think, maybe he truly is something extraordinary. He’s what he is, that’s it. Maybe that makes him strong enough, being what he is. The Combine hasn’t got to him in all these years; what makes the nurse think she’s gonna be able to do it in a few weeks? He’s not gonna let them twist him and manufacture him.

There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.

They met so near with their lips that their breaths embraced together.

And books! ...she would buy them all over and over again; she would buy up every copy, I believe, to prevent their falling into unworthy hands; and she would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree.

But as de old folk always say, Ah'm born but Ah ain't dead. No tellin' whut Ah'm liable tuh do yet.

She knew things that nobody had ever told her... She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pastor of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one every sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making.

I think that in order to know love one must make a mistake and then correct it.

Perhaps it's because I appreciate all I have so much that I don't worry about what I haven't got.

Once you go on welfare it changes you. Even if you get off welfare, you never escape the stigma that you were a charity case. You're scarred for life.

Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespear and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.

Too much hard luck can create a permanent meanness of spirit in any creature.

And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life.

People worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you. It immunized your body and soul...

Was he an animal if music could captivate him so? It seemed to him that he was being shown the way to the unknown nourishment he had been yearning for.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.

Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now. We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:— That is God.Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!— What? Mr Deasy asked.— A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.

Kiss me till I'm in a coma. Hug me, honey, snuggly.

Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like a beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts. The danger is grayout.

I told Mom that maybe I had made a terrible mistake, but mom said sometimes you have to get sicker before you can get better.