One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Events Quotes

Part I, Chapter One

They don't bother not talking out loud about their hate secrets when I'm nearby because they think I'm deaf and dumb. Everybody thinks so. I'm cagey enough to fool them that much. If my being half...

Part I, Chapter Two

When the fog clears to where I can see, I'm sitting in the day room. They didn't take me to the Shock Shop this time. I remember they took me out of the shaving room and locked me in Seclusion. I d...

Part I, Chapter Three

One side of the room younger patients, known as Acutes because the doctors figure them still sick enough to be fixed, practice arm wrestling and card tricks where you add and subtract and count dow...

Part I, Chapter Four

"What, Miss Ratched, is your opinion of this new patient? I mean, gee, he's good-looking and friendly and everything, but in my humble opinion he certainly takes over." The Big Nurse tests a needle...

Part I, Chapter Five

The doctor fishes his glasses out again and puts them on and looks to where McMurphy is pointing. "Right here, Doc. The nurse left this part out while she was summarizing my record. Where it says,...

Part I, Chapter Eight

Then, just as she's rolling along at her biggest and meanest, McMurphy steps out of the latrine door right in front of her, holding that towel around his hips—stops her dead! She shrinks to about...

Part I, Chapter Nine

He tugs at that little tuft of red showing out of the neck of his greens, then says, "Well, hey; what do you say to us taking the card game someplace else? Some other room? Like, say, that room you...

Part I, Chapter Fifteen

And we're all sitting there lined up in front of that blanked-out TV set, watching the gray screen just like we could see the baseball game clear as day, and she's ranting and screaming behind us....

Part II, Chapter One

Out in the hall all by myself, I notice how clear it is—no fog any place. It's a little cold where the nurse just went past, and the white tubes in the ceiling circulate frozen light like rods of...

Part II, Chapter Three

In the group meetings there were gripes coming up that had been buried so long the thing being griped about had already changed. Now that McMurphy was around to back them up, the guys started letti...

Part II, Chapter Seven

"You have more to lose than I do," Harding says again. "I'm voluntary. I'm not committed." McMurphy doesn't say a word. He's got that same puzzled look on his face like there's something isn't righ...

Part II, Chapter Eight

[Nurse Ratched:] "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...

Part III, Chapter Two

"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? No? You must burry on? Ah, he's go...

Part IV, Chapter Three

As I walked after them it came to me as a kind of sudden surprise that I was drunk, actually drunk, glowing and grinning and staggering drunk for the first time since the Army, drunk along with hal...

Part IV, Chapter Four

The big, hard body had a tough grip on life. It fought a long time against having it taken away, flailing and thrashing around so much I finally had to lie full length on top of it and scissor the...