There are going to be times when we can't wait for somebody. Now, you're either on the bus or off the bus. If you're on the bus, and you get left behind, then you'll find it again. If you're off the bus in the first place — then it won't make a damn.

It isn't by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.

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.

Now, you’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus.

But, gee," the other nurse says, "what on earth would MAKE a man want to do something like disrupt the ward for, Miss Ratched? What possible motive...?""You seem to forget, MISS Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane.

But the more I read... after awhile... I begin to find they were all writing about the same thing, this same dull old here-today-gone-tomorrow scene... Shakespeare, Milton, Matthew Arnold, even Baudelaire, even this cat whoever he was that wrote Beowulf... the same scene for the same reasons and to the same end, whether it was Dante with his pit or Baudelaire with his pot... the same dull old scene...

She asked if we were calm enough for her to take off the cuffs, and McMurphy nodded. He had slumped over with his head hung and his elbows between his knees and looked completely exhausted--it hadn't occurred to me that it was just as hard for him to stand straight as it was for me.