Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)

53 Sourced Quotes

View all Ken Kesey Quotes
You think I wuh-wuh-wuh-want to stay in here? You think I wouldn't like a con-con-vertible and a guh-guh-girl friend? But did you ever have people l-l-laughing at you? No, because you're so b-big and so tough! Well, I'm not big and tough.

Ken Kesey
You seem to forget, Miss Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane.

Ken Kesey
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
This is what I know. The ward is a factory for the Combine. It's for fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in the schools and in the churches, the hospital is. When a completed product goes back out into society, all fixed up good as new, better than new sometimes, it brings joy to the Big Nurse's heart; something that came in all twisted and different is now a functioning, adjusted component, a credit to the whole outfit and a marvel to behold.

Ken Kesey
No, my friend. We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you?

Ken Kesey
Mr. Bibbit, you might warn this Mr. Harding that I'm so crazy I admit to voting for Eisenhower.
Bibbit! You tell Mr. McMurphy I'm so crazy I voted for Eisenhower twice!
And you tell Mr. Harding right back — he puts both hands on the table and leans down, his voice getting low — that I'm so crazy I plan to vote for Eisenhower again this November.

Ken Kesey
I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound.

Ken Kesey
No, that nurse ain't some kinda monster chicken, buddy, what she is is a ball-cutter. I've seen a thousand of 'em, old and young, men and women. Seen 'em all over the country and in the homes- people who try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow their rules, to live like they want you to. And the best way to do this, to get you to knuckle under, is to weaken you by gettin' you where it hurts the worst.

Ken Kesey
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
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
"What worries me, Billy," she said — I could hear the change in her voice — "is how your mother is going to take this."

Ken Kesey
They can't tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.

Ken Kesey
- he's finished with that; it's like an old clock that won't tell time but won't stop neither, with the hands bent out of shape and the face bare of numbers and the alarm bell rusted silent, an old worthless clock that just keeps ticking and cuckooing without meaning nothing.

Ken Kesey
His whole body shakes with the strain as he tries to lift something he knows he can't lift, something everybody knows he can't lift. But, for just a second, when we hear the cement grind at our feet, we think, by golly, he might do it.

Ken Kesey
I don't think you fully understand the public, my friend; in this country, when something is out of order, then the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way.

Ken Kesey
I thought for a minute there I saw her whipped. Maybe I did. But I see now that it don't make any difference.... To beat her you don't have to whip her two out of three or three out of five, but every time you meet. As soon as you let down your guard, as soon as you lose once, she's won for good. And eventually we all got to lose. Nobody can help that.

Ken Kesey
I lay in bed the night before the fishing trip and thought it over, about my being deaf, about the years of not letting on I heard what was said, and I wonder if I can ever act any other way again. But I remembered 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.

Ken Kesey
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.

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

Ken Kesey
I watched and tried to figure out what he would have done. I was only sure of one thing: he wouldn't have left something like that sit there in the day room with his name tacked on it for twenty or thirty years so the Big Nurse could use it as an example of what can happen if you buck the system. I was sure of that.

Ken Kesey
He gave a cry. At the last, falling backward, his face appearing to us for a second upside down before he was smothered on the floor by a pile of white uniforms, he let himself cry out: A sound of cornered-animal fear and hate and surrender and defiance, that if you ever trailed coon or cougar or lynx is like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn't care any more about anything but himself and his dying.

Ken Kesey
The secret of being a top-notch con man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make him think he's getting it.

Ken Kesey
But just as soon as we got to the pool he said he did wish something mighta been done, though, and dove into the water.

Ken Kesey