One Flew Over The Cuckoo S Nest Quotes

“He knows that there's no better way in the world to aggravate somebody who's trying to make it hard for you than by acting like you're not bothered.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“And then some guy wandering as lost as you would all of a sudden be right before your eyes, his face bigger and clearer than you ever saw a man’s face before in your life. Your eyes were working so hard to see in that fog that when something did come in sight every detail was ten times as clear as usual, so clear both of you had to look away. When a man showed up you didn’t want to look at his face and he didn’t want to look at yours, because it’s painful to see somebody so clear that it’s like looking inside him, but then neither did you want to look away and lose him completely. 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.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“You're making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You're not crazy the way they think. Yes...I see...”
― 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

“I don't seem able to get it straight in my mind....”
― Ken Kesey, 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.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“Then the weeks rolled by in a sinister psych ward haze filled with white-coated orderlies and rocking whack-job patients torn straight from some old Jack Nicholson film, all anti-psychotic meds and padded lonely cells...”
― Shannon Celebi, Small Town Demons

“Sweeping the dorm soon's it's empty, I'm after dust mice under his bed when I get a smell of something that makes me realize for the first time since I been in the hospital that the big dorm full of beds, sleeps forty grown men, has always been sticky with a thousand other smells - smells of germicide, zinc ointment, and foot powder, smell of piss and sour old-man manure, of Pablum and eyewash, of musty shorts and socks musty even when they're fresh back from the laundry, the stiff odor of starch in the linen, the acid stench of morning mouths, the banana smell of machine oil, and sometimes the smell of singed hair - but never before now, before he came in, the man smell of dust and dirt from the open fields, and sweat, and work.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest