One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest Quotes

What’s the first image that comes to mind when you think of a mental hospital? Jack Nicholson in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ right? We need to change that perception, and places like this one are doing that.

In terms of popular cinema, ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ is as near perfection as I can think of.

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.

But I remember 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

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

I bought the book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I paid to have it made into a play and I played in it for six months. I came back and I tried to make it into a movie, without success.

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.

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.

They can’t tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.

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.

I aspire to be Jack Nicholson. I love his every single mannerism. I used to try and be him in virtually everything I did, I don’t know why. I watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when I was about 13, and I dressed like him. I tried to do his accent. I did everything like him. I think it kind of stuck with me.

You’re making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You’re not crazy the way they think. Yes…I see.

But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.