Browsing Topic Best Cuckoos Quotes

Human society is based on want. Life is based on want. Wild-eyed visionaries may dream of a world without need. Cloud-cuckoo-land. It can’t be done.

Is life worth living? Yes, so long As Spring revives the year, And hails us with the cuckoo’s song, To show that she is here.

I never really set out to research any of these stories. I try to lead an interesting life though. I guess the closest I came to research was when I applied to work at the state mental institution in Austin, TX. I wanted to work the night shift like Ken Kesey did when he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I thought that might inspire me to write a book that great.

The government’s living in its own cloud cuckoo land and it’s a cloud of greenhouse gases.

And by the meadow-trenches blow the faint sweet cuckoo-flowers.

Since both its national products, snow and chocolate, melt, the cuckoo clock was invented solely in order to give tourists something solid to remember it by.

The beauty of a cuckoo is in its notes, that of a woman in her unalloyed devotion to her husband, that of an ugly person in his scholarship, and that of an ascetic in his forgiveness.

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.

When I was seven, I watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with my mom. When Jack Nicholson was strapped to the table getting electroshock treatment, my mom burst into tears. She said it reminded her of her life, and I was stunned, because I didn’t know my mom had been nominated for an Oscar.

The cuckoos remain silent for a long time (for several seasons) until they are able to sing sweetly (in the Spring) so as to give joy to all.

As one sits here in summertime and listens to the cuckoo and all the other bird songs, the crackling and buzzing of insects, as one gazes at the shining colors of flowers, doth one become dumbstruck before the Kingdom of the Creator.

Did I ever tell you,’ said Lymond pausing on the afterthought, on his way to the flap, ‘that that aunt of mine once hatched an egg?’ He paused, deep in thought, and walked slowly to the door before turning again. His lordship of Aubigny, staring after the vanishing form of his brother, received the full splendour of Lymond’s smile. ‘It was a cuckoo,’ said Francis Crawford prosaically, and followed Lennox out.

The belief that you have a great idea is not worth cuckoo spit. Ideas are ten a penny while the ability to execute counts for a great deal more.

If you say you’ve had a nervous breakdown or things aren’t right mentally, people run away from you. They think you’re from ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,’ you know.

I get all my ideas in Switzerland near the Forka Pass. There is a little town called Gletch, and two thousand feet up above Gletch there is a smaller hamlet called Über Gletch. I go there on the fourth of August every summer to get my cuckoo clock fixed. While the cuckoo is in the hospital, I wander around and talk to the people in the streets. They are very strange people, and I get my ideas from them.

Negative? Moi? I think realistic might be a better word. You mean to tell me we can drive all the way here from L.A. and see maybe ten thousand square miles of shopping malls, and you don’t have maybe just the weentsiest inkling that something, somewhere has gone very very cuckoo?

In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

The course of the seasons is a piece of clockwork, with a cuckoo to call when it is spring.

Have I got a mother-in-law. She’s so neat she puts paper under the cuckoo clock.

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

At the center, where a cuckoo bird would live in a more traditional timepiece, is the juggler. Dressed in harlequin style with a grey mask, he juggles shiny silver balls that correspond to each hour. As the clock chimes, another ball joins the rest until at midnight he juggles twelve balls in a complex pattern. After midnight the clock begins once more to fold in upon itself. The face lightens and the clouds return. The number of juggled balls decreases until the juggler himself vanishes. By noon it is a clock again, and no longer a dream.

We ought never to sport with pain and distress in any of our amusements, or treat even the meanest insect with wanton cruelty.

I never thought about writing. I was married young, I was still in college, as we did then, and I had two babies before I was 25, and I loved them, and I loved taking care of them, but I was a little bit cuckoo, staying at home and not having a creative outlet.

I`m kind of like one of those people that picks up small and interesting bits of wood and doesn`t want to let go of them. Or, you know, I`m fascinated with the wrapper on a sardine can. A little cuckoo.

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.

But I tried, didn’t I? Goddamnit, at least I did that.

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

Owls hoot in B flat, cuckoos in D, but the water ousel sings in the voice of the stream. She builds her nest back of the waterfalls so the water is a lullaby to the little ones. Must be where they learn it.

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

In the economy of the cuckoo people that populate central banks, everything is possible. What you have is gigantic bubbles, the NASDAQ in 2000, then the housing bubble and then commodities in 2008 when oil went from $78 to $147 before plunging to $32 within six months.

I think there are some groups of stocks that are highly vulnerable because they’re in cuckoo land in terms of valuations.

We were surprised how closely the cuckoo imitated the clock-and yet, of course, it could never have heard a clock.

If the cuckoo does not sing, kill it.

I had those kind of parents where I watched all of these very sophisticated movies: ‘Five Easy Pieces’, ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.’

The Attic warbler pours her throat, Responsive to the cuckoo’s note, The untaught harmony of spring.