They’re trying to act like they still got their eyes on nothing but that blank TV in front of us, but anyone can see they’re all sneaking looks at the Big Nurse behind her glass there, just the same as I am. For the first time she’s on the other side of the glass and getting a taste of how it feels to be watched when you wish more than anything else to be able to pull a green shade between your face and all the eyes that you can’t get away from.
McMurphy doesn’t know it, but he’s onto what I realized a long time back, that it’s not just the Big Nurse by herself, but it’s the whole Combine, the nation-wide Combine that’s the really big force, and the nurse is just a high-ranking official for them.
Please understand: We do not impose certain rules and restrictions on you without a great deal of thought about their therapeutic value. A good many of you are in here because you could not adjust to the rules of society in the Outside World, because you refused to face up to them, because you tried to circumvent them and avoid them. At some time—perhaps in your childhood—you may have been allowed to get away with flouting the rules of society. When you broke a rule you knew it. You wanted to be dealt with, needed it, but the punishment did not come. That foolish lenience on the part of your parents may have been the germ that grew into your present illness. I tell you this hoping you will understand that it is entirely for your own good that we enforce discipline and order.
[Nurse Ratched] knew that people, being like they are, sooner or later are going to draw back a ways from somebody who seems to be giving a little more than ordinary, form Santa Clauses and missionaries and men donating funds to worthy causes, and begin to wonder: what’s in it for them? Grin out of the side of their mouths when the young lawyer, say, brings a sack of pecans to the kids in his district school—just before nominations for state senate, the sly devil—and say to one another, He’s nobody’s fool.
I tried to talk to [McMurphy] into playing along with [Nurse Ratched] so’s to get out of the treatments, but he just laughed and told me Hell, all they was doin’ was chargin’ his battery for him, free for nothing.
First Charles Cheswick and now William Bibbit! I hope you’re finally satisfied. Playing with human lives—gambling with human lives—as if you thought yourself to be a God!
She tried to get her ward back into shape, but it was difficult with McMurphy’s presence still tromping up and down the halls and laughing out loud in the meetings and singing in the latrines. She couldn’t rule with her old power any more, not by writing things on pieces of paper. She was losing her patients one after the other. After Harding signed out and was picked up by his wife, and George transferred to a different ward, just three of us were left out of the group that had been on the fishing crew, myself and Martini and Scanlon.
Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;...
Act I, Scene 1, Line 8
I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,
When in a wood of Crete they bay'd the bear...
Act IV, Scene 1, Line 1667
'Tis strange my Theseus, that these
lovers speak of.
Act V, Scene 1, Line 1830
But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,...
Act V, Scene 1, Line 1853
I love not to see wretchedness o'er charged
And duty in his service perishing.
Act V, Scene 1, Line 1925
He says they can do nothing in this kind.
Act V, Scene 1, Line 1928
Indeed he hath played on his prologue like a child
on a recorder; a sound, but not in government.
Act V, Scene 1, Line 1965
This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.
Act V, Scene 1, Line 2055
It must be your imagination then, and not theirs.
Act V, Scene 1, Line 2058
I am aweary of this moon: would he would change!
Act V, Scene 1, Line 2091
Well shone, Moon. Truly, the moon shines with a
good grace.
Act V, Scene 1, Line 2107
Beshrew my heart, but I pity the man.
Act V, Scene 1, Line 2132