“One flew east, One flew west, One flew over the cuckoo's nest.”
A children's folk rhyme quoted in the front pages of the book.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)
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Ken Kesey 103
novelist 1935–2001Related quotes

“The sign was an eagle. It flew east.”
By the Waters of Babylon (1937)
Context: I went fasting, as is the law. My body hurt but not my heart. When the dawn came, I was out of sight of the village. I prayed and purified myself, waiting for a sign. The sign was an eagle. It flew east.
Sometimes signs are sent by bad spirits. I waited again on the flat rock, fasting, taking no food. I was very still — I could feel the sky above me and the earth beneath. I waited till the sun was beginning to sink. Then three deer passed in the valley going east — they did not mind me or see me. There was a white fawn with them — a very great sign.
Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

Source: Reminiscences (1964), p. 265
World Within World (1951)
Context: I am for neither West nor East, but for myself considered as a self — one of the millions who inhabit the earth... If it seems absurd that an individual should set up as a judge between these vast powers, armed with their superhuman instruments of destruction I can reply that the very immensity of the means to destroy proves that judging and being judged does not lie in these forces. For supposing that they achieved their utmost and destroyed our civilization, whoever survived would judge them by a few statements. a few poems, a few témoignages [testimonies] surviving from all the ruins, a few words of those men who saw outside and beyond the means which were used and all the arguments which were marshaled in the service of those means.
Thus I could not escape from myself into some social situation of which my existence was a mere product, and my witnessing a willfully distorting instrument. I had to be myself, choose and not be chosen... But to believe that my individual freedom could gain strength from my seeking to identify myself with the "progressive" forces was different from believing that my life must be an instrument of means decided on by political leaders. I came to see that within the struggle for a juster world, there is a further struggle between the individual who cares for long-term values and those who are willing to use any and every means to gain immediate political ends — even good ends. Within even a good social cause, there is a duty to fight for the pre-eminence of individual conscience. The public is necessary, but the private must not be abolished by it; and the individual must not be swallowed up by the concept of the social man.

“Know, Nature, like the cuckoo, laughs at law,
Placing her eggs in whatso nest she will.”
Source: Savonarola (1881), Lorenzo de' Medici in Act I, sc. i; p. 14.

"The Demands of the Egg"
The Life of Birds (1998)