Top 50 Quotes You Need for Your Essay from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

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#11: “The Combine hasn’t got to him in all these years; what makes that nurse think she’s gonna be able to do it in a few weeks? He’s not gonna let them twist him and manufacture him”

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Rhetorical question, motif, industrial imagery

#12: “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.”

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Repetition

#13: “A success, they say, but I say he’s just another robot for the Combine and might be better off as a failure.” 

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Motif, metaphor

#14: “And when the fog was finally swept from my head it seemed like I’d just come up after a long, deep dive, breaking the surface after being under water a hundred years. It was the last treatment they gave me.”

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Motif, simile, hyperbole

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Quotes about Power

#15: “McMurphy doesn’t know it, but he’s onto what I realized a long time back, that it’s not just the Big Nurse by herself, but it’s the whole Combine, the nation-wide Combine that’s the really big force, and the nurse is just a high-ranking official for them.”

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Motif, synecdoche

#16: “This world… belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak.”

• Character: Harding
• Techniques: Exclamation

#17: “‘You’re committed you realize. You are… under the jurisdiction of me… the staff.’ She’s holding up a fist, all those red-orange fingernails burning into her palm. ‘Under jurisdiction and control-’”

• Character: Nurse Ratched
• Techniques: Dialogue, metaphor

#18: She’s lost a little battle here today, but it’s a minor battle in a big war that she’s been winning and that she’ll go on winning.  

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Symbolism, metaphor, repetition

#19: “First Charles Cheswick and now William Bibbit! I hope you’re finally satisfied. Playing with human lives—gambling with human lives—as if you thought yourself to be a God!”

• Character: Nurse Ratched
• Techniques: Exclamation, repetition

#20: “No. He isn’t extraordinary. He is simply a man and no more, and is subject to all the fears and all the cowardice and all the timidity that any other man is subject to.”

• Character: Nurse Ratched
• Techniques: Anaphora

#21: “You let me go on hassling Nurse Ratched here, knowing how much I had to lose, and you never told me nothing.”

• Character: Randell McMurphy
• Techniques

#22: “Maybe the combine wasn’t all-powerful. What was to stop us from doing it again, now that we saw we could?” 

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Rhetorical question, motif

#23: “The Big Nurse is able to set the wall clock at whatever speed she wants by just turning one of those dials in the steel door; she takes a notion to hurry things up, she turns the speed up, and those hands whip around.”

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Symbolism

#24: “I’m afraid”-she stabs the needle down in the rubber-capped vial and lifts the plunger-”that is exactly what the new patient is planning: to take over. He is what we call a ‘manipulator’ Miss Flinn, a man who will use everyone and everything to his own ends”

• Character: Nurse Ratched
• Techniques: Dialogue

#25: “Bug her till she comes apart at those neat little seams, and shows, just one time, she ain’t so unbeatable as you think.”

• Character: Randel McMurphy
• Techniques: Foreshadowing, colloquialism

Sanity and Insanity Quotes from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

#26: “Across the room from the Acutes are the culls of the Combine’s product, the Chronics. Not in the hospital, these, to get fixed, but just to keep them from walking around the streets giving the product a bad name.”

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Motif

#27: “What do you think you are, for Chrissake, crazy or somethin’? Well you’re not! You’re not! You’re no crazier than the average asshole out walkin’ around on the streets and that’s it. ”

• Character: Randle McMurphy
• Techniques: Exclamation, rhetorical question, humorous tone

#28: “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.”

• Character: Harding
• Techniques: Repetition, anaphora, irony 

#29: “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.”

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Motif, colloquialism

#30: “Society is what decides who’s sane and who isn’t, so you got to measure up.”

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Symbolism

#31: “What a Life: Give some of us pills to stop a fit, give the rest shock to start one.”

• Character: Randel McMurphy
• Techniques: Irony, paradox 

#32: ‘“It wasn’t the practices I don’t think, it was the feeling that the great, deadly, pointing forefinger of society was pointing at me- and the great voice of millions chanting, ‘Shame. Shame. Shame’ It’s society’s way of dealing with someone different.”’

• Character: Harding
• Techniques: Hyperbole

#33: “If somebody’d of come in and took a look, men watching a blank TV, a fifty-year-old woman hollering and squealing at the back of their heads about discipline and order and recriminations, they’d of thought the whole bunch was crazy as loons.”

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Irony, colloquialism

#34: “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.”

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Irony, paradox

#35: “It’s like…that big red hand of McMurphy’s is reaching into the fog and dropping down and dragging the men up by their hands, dragging them blinking into the open.”

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Simile, metaphor, assonance

#36: “Guilt. Shame. Fear. Self-belittlement. I discovered at an early age that I was- shall we be kind and say different?”

• Character: Harding
• Techniques: Rhetorical question, asyndeton

#37: “It’s my first day, and what I like to do is make a good impression straight off on the right man if he can prove to me he is the right man. Who’s the bull goose loony here?”

• Character: Randle McMurphy
• Techniques: Rhetorical question, colloquialism, humorous tone

Women and Emasculation

#38: “… There’s no compact or lipstick or woman stuff, she’s got that bag full of a thousand parts she aims to use in her duties today—wheels and gears, cogs polished to a hard glitter, tiny pills that gleam like porcelain, needles, forceps, watchmakers’ piers, rolls of copper wire.”

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Hyperbole, industrial imagery, listing

#39: “…Doctors, all ages and types, come and rise up in front of her with ideas of their own about the way a ward should be run, some with backbone enough to stand behind their ideas, and she fixes these doctors with dry-ice eyes day in, day out, until they retreat with unnatural chills.”

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Metaphor

#40: “But the Big Nurse has come up quietly, locked her hand on his arm, paralyzes him all the way to the shoulder.”

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Imagery 

#41: “That’s why the hospital regards her as its top nurse and grants her so much authority; she’s a master of forcing the trembling libido out into the open-”’

• Character: Harding
• Techniques: Personification 

#42: “‘Doctor Spivey… is exactly like the rest of us, McMurphy, completely conscious of his inadequacy. He’s a frightened, desperate, ineffectual little rabbit, totally incapable of running this ward without our Miss Ratched’s help, and he knows it.'”

• Character: Harding
• Techniques: Metaphor, listing

#43: “So she really lets herself go and her painted smile twists, stretches to an open snarl, and she blows up bigger and bigger, big as a tractor, so big I can smell the machinery inside the way you smell a motor pulling too big a load.” 

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Hyperbole, simile, anaphora, olfactory imagery

#44: “Her face is smooth, calculated, and precision-made, like an expensive baby doll, skin like flesh-colored enamel, blend of white and cream and baby-blue eyes, small nose, pink little nostrils.”

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Simile, imagery

#45: “If you’re up against a guy who wants to win by making you weaker instead of making himself stronger, then watch for his knee, he’s gonna go for your vitals. And that’s what that old buzzard is doing, going for your vitals.”

• Character: Randle McMurphy
• Techniques: Analogy, metaphor

#46: “The Big Nurse tends to get real put out if something keeps her outfit from running like a smooth, accurate, precision-made machine. The slightest thing messy or out of kilter or in the way ties her into a little white knot of tight-smiled fury.” 

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Motif, industrial imagery 

#47: “She darted her eyes out with every word, stabbing at the men’s faces, but the men were immune to her poison.  Their eyes met hers; their grins mocked the old confident smile she had lost…she tried so hard to sound cold and stern.”

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Metaphor

#48: “She may be a mother, but she’s big as a damn barn and tough as a knife metal. She fooled me with that kindly little old mother bit for maybe three minutes when I came in this morning, but no longer.”

• Character: Randle McMurphy 
• Techniques: Simile

#49: “Right at your balls. No, that nurse ain’t some kinda chicken monster, buddy, what she is is a ball cutter.”

• Character: Randle McMurphy
• Techniques: Colloquialism, harsh tone 

#50: “There’s something strange about a place where the men won’t let themselves loose and laugh, something strange about the way they all knuckle under to that smiling flour-faced old mother there with the too-red lipstick and the too-big boobs.”

• Character: Chief Bromden
• Techniques: Motif, imagery