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.
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.
I'm accustomed to being top man. I been a bull goose catskinner for every gyppo logging operation in the Northwest and bull goose gambler all the way from Korea, was even bull goose pea weeder on that pea farm at Pendleton -- so I figure if I'm bound to be a loony, then I'm bound to be a stompdown dadgum good one.
This world… belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak.
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.
It's the truth, even if it didn't happen.
We'd just shared the last beer and slung the empty can out the window at a stop sign and were just waiting back to get the feel of the day, swimming in that kind of tasty drowsiness that comes over you after a day of going hard at something you enjoy doing -- half sunburned and half drunk and keeping awake only because you wanted to savor the taste as long as you could.
But it's the truth even if it didn't happen.
Like a cartoon world, where the figures are flat and outlined in black, jerking through some kind of goofy story that might be real funny if it weren't for the cartoon figures being real guys...
What makes people so impatient is what I can't figure; all the guy had to do was wait.
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.
Memory whispers someplace in that jumbled machinery.
What the Chronics are - or most of us - are machines with flaws inside that can't be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot.
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.
More was revealed in a human face than a human being can bear face to face.
You can't really be strong until you can see a funny side things.
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.
Never before did I realize that mental illness could have the aspect of power, power. Think of it: perhaps the more insane a man is, the more powerful he could become. Hitler an example. Fair makes the old brain reel, doesn't it?
You get your visions through whatever gate you're granted.
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.
No one's ever dared come out and say it before, but there's not a man among us that doesn't think it, that doesn't feel just as you do about her and the whole business - feel it somewhere down deep in his scared little soul.
You're making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You're not crazy the way they think. Yes...I see...
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.
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?
Alarm, when used for anything less than a fire or an air attack, is certain to muddle the mind, unsettle the senses, and, in most cases, more than double the danger.
He's the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people.
Rules? PISS ON YOUR FUCKING RULES!
Because sometimes the only way to keep from losing everything is to give everything up. Because sometimes strength must for the sake of winning give in to--
I don't seem able to get it straight in my mind....
That ain't me, that ain't my face. It wasn't even me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn't even really me them; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted.
But if the strength ain't real, I recall thinking the very last thing that day, before I finally passed out, then the weakness sure enough is. Weakness is true and real. I used to accuse the kid of faking his weakness. But faking proves the weakness is real. Or you wouldn't be so weak as to fake it. No, you can't ever fake being weak. You can only fake being strong. . .
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.
The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon
For there is always a sanctuary more, a door that can never be forced, a last inviolable stronghold that can never be taken, whatever the attack; your vote can be taken, you name, you innards, or even your life, but that last stonghold can only be surrendered. And to surrender it for any reason other than love is to surrender love.
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.
The world news might not be therapeutic.
He couldn't seem to get his teeth into anything. Except books. The things in books was darn near more real to him than the things breathing and eating.
I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound.
Then-as he was talking-a set of tail-lights going past lit up McMurphy's face, and the windshield reflected an expression that was allowed only because he figured it'd be too dark for anybody in the car to see, dreadfully tired and strained and frantic, like there wasn't enough time left for something he had to do...
One of the reasons for his drinking, Henry said, was John's mama used to make the whole family get down on their knees and pray like fury everytime John's daddy--Henry's first cousin, I believe--would come home boozed, and John never quite got it straight that they weren't thanking the good Lord for his blessing same as they did at the supper table. So according to Henry booze come to be sort of holy to him and with faith like that John grew up religious as a deacon.
I want to touch him because I'm one of these queers!
There's no doubt in my mind that McMurphy's won, but I'm not sure what.
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.
They can't tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.
If you don't watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite.
They're out there...One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
'I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower.' 'Oh yeah, well I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower TWICE'
The Republican consciousness has no integrity and it falls apart once you check it out. If you're a Christian, why would you want to fry this dude?
Take what you can use and let the rest go by.
The trouble with super heroes is what to do between phone booths.
Loved. You can't use it in the past tense. Death does not stop that love at all.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories