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“Hell, are you birds telling me I can’t lift that dinky little gizmo?”

“My friend, I don’t recall anything about psychopaths being able to move mountains in addition to their other noteworthy assets.”

“Okay, you say I can’t lift it. Well by God ...”

McMurphy hops off the table and goes to peeling off his green jacket; the tattoos sticking half out of his T-shirt jump around the muscles on his arms.

"Then who’s willing to lay five bucks? Nobody’s gonna convince me I can’t do something till I try it. Five bucks ...”

“McMurphy, this is as foolhardy as your bet about the nurse.”

“Who’s got five bucks they want to lose? You hit or you sit. ...”

The guys all go to signing liens at once; he’s beat them so many times at poker and blackjack they can’t wait to get back at him, and this is a certain sure thing. I don’t know what he’s driving at; broad and big as he is, it’d take three of him to move that panel, and he knows it. He can just look at it and see he probably couldn’t even tip it, let alone lift it. It’d take a giant to lift it off the ground. But when the Acutes all get their IOUs signed, he steps up to the panel and lifts Billy Bibbit down off it and spits in his big callused palms and slaps them together, rolls his shoulders.

“Okay, stand outa the way. Sometimes when I go to exertin’ myself I use up all the air nearby and grown men faint from suffocation. Stand back. There’s liable to be crackin’ cement and flying steel. Get the women and kids someplace safe. Stand back. ...”

“By golly, he might do it,” Cheswick mutters.

“Sure, maybe he’ll talk it off the floor,”Fredrickson says.

“More likely he’ll acquire a beautiful hernia,” Harding says. “Come now, McMurphy, quit acting like a fool; there’s no man can lift that thing.”

“Stand back, sissies, you’re using my oxygen.”

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest