All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down. (Ken Kesey, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest")
All that five thousand kids lived in those five thousand houses, owned by guys that got off the train. The houses looked so much alike that, time and time again, the kids went home by mistake to different houses and different families. Nobody ever noticed. (Ken Kesey, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest")
But the new guy is different, and the Acutes can see it, different from anybody been coming on this ward for the past ten years, different from anybody they ever met outside. He's just as vulnerable, maybe, but the Combine didn't get him. (Ken Kesey, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest")
But the rest are even scared to open up and laugh. You know, that's the first thing that got me about this place, that there wasn't anybody laughing. I haven't heard a real laugh since I came through that door, do you know that? Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing. (Ken Kesey, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest")
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")
He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. (Ken Kesey, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest")
He was in his chair in the corner, resting a second before he came out for the next round -- in a long line of next rounds. The thing he was fighting, you couldn't whip it for good. All you could do was keep on whipping it, till you couldn't come out anymore and somebody else had to take your place. (Ken Kesey, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest")
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, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest")
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, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest")
I was actually going out of the hospital with two whores on a fishing boat; I had to keep saying it over and over to myself to believe it. (Ken Kesey, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest")