Ken Kesey Quotes

I've thought of everything, know what I mean?

One of the reasons for his drinking, Henry said, was John's mama used to make the whole family get down on their knees and pray like fury everytime John's daddy
Henry's first cousin, I believe
would come home boozed, and John never quite got it straight that they weren't thanking the good Lord for his blessing same as they did at the supper table. So according to Henry booze come to be sort of holy to him and with faith like that John grew up religious as a deacon.

It's fall coming, I kept thinking, fall coming; just like that was the strangest thing ever happened. Fall. Right outside here it was spring a while back, then it was summer, and now it's fall-that's sure a curious idea.

He Who Marches Out Of Step Hears Another Drum

There've been a lot more people hurt on astro-turf than grass.

I'll trim you babies like little lambs

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 ...

What a cheery atmosphere, don't you agree?

To Vik Lovell who told me dragons did not exist, then led me to their lairs ...

Anti-drug fanatics and cops are the criminals - it's like McCarthyism. They need someone to dislike to distract the public from the really important problems.

You must go through a winter to understand.

The raw materials of reality without the glue of time are materials adrift and reality is as meaningless as the balsa parts of a model airplane scattered to the wind.

And the redwinged blackbirds sing in the budding greengage plumtree.

Don't say it ... I've seen too many loves sundered by too much needless honesty.

No one's ever dared come out and say it before, but there's not a man among us that doesn't think it, that doesn't feel just as you do about her and the whole business - feel it somewhere down deep in his scared little soul.

She was fifteen years old, going on thirty-five, Doc, and she told me she was eighteen, she was very willing, I practically had to take to sewing my pants shut. Between you and me, uh, she might have been fifteen, but when you get that little red beaver right up there in front of you, I don't think it's crazy at all and I don't think you do either. No man alive could resist that, and that's why I got into jail to begin with. And now they're telling me I'm crazy over here because I don't sit there like a goddamn vegetable. Don't make a bit of sense to me. If that's what being crazy is, then I'm senseless, out of it, gone-down-the-road, wacko. But no more, no less, that's it.

The walls are white as the white suits, polished clean as a refrigerator door, and the black face and hands seem to float against it like a ghost.

You're just a young kid. What are you doin' here? You oughta be out in a convertible, why ... bird-doggin' chicks and bangin' beaver. What are ya doin' here, for Christ's sake? What's funny about that? Jesus, I mean, you guys do nothin' but complain about how you can't stand it in this place here and then you haven't got the guts just to walk out!

I want to touch him because I'm one of these queers!

Since we don't know where we're going, we have to stick together in case someone gets there.

There is generally one person in every situation you must never underestimate the power of.

You can't blame the President for the state of the country, it's always the poets' fault. You can't expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don't have it in them. Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold.

I'd think, maybe he truly is something extraordinary. He's what he is, that's it. Maybe that makes him strong enough, being what he is.

Fascism wants Baptism coast to coast.

Then the trembling starts to get worse. This must be how they begin, he thinks. Freak-outs. Breakdowns. Crack-ups. Eventually shut-ins and finally cross-offs. But first the cover-up ...

I felt like you can write forever, but you have a short time to raise a family. And I think a family is a lot more important than writing.

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.

He's safe as long as he can laugh, he thinks, and it works pretty fair.

The dead's dead ... get 'em in the ground and look to the live ones.

You're making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You're not crazy the way they think. Yes ... I see ...

I forget sometimes what laughter can do.

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

The truth doesn't have to do with cruelty, the truth has to do with mercy.

Ritual is necessary for us to know anything.

A sound of cornered-animal fear and hate and surrender and defiance ... like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn't care about anything but himself and his dying.

What the Chronics are - or most of us - are machines with flaws inside that can't be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot.

You don't lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case.

If grass were legalized, it would help our drug problem enormously.

He had come to life for maybe a minute to try to tell us something, something none of us cared to listen to or tried to understand, and the effort had drained him dry.

Nobody's gonna convince me I can't do something till I try it." -- McMurphy

She likes a rigged game.

Rules? PISS ON YOUR FUCKING RULES!

What can you pay for the way a man lives? What can you pay for what a man is?

He's got hands so long and white and dainty I think they carved each other out of soap, and sometimes they get loose and glide around in front of him free as two white birds until he notices them and traps them between his knees; it bothers him that he's got pretty hands.

In any given situation there will always be more dumb people than smart people. We ain't many!

It's fall coming, I thought, I can smell that sour-molasses smell of silage, clanging the air like a bell – smell like somebody's been burning oak leaves, left them to smolder overnight because they're too green.

I was raised a Christian and was a stone-faced acid head.

I could now (possibly) go back and restretch those shrunken hours, flake the images separate, arrange them in accurate chronological order, (possibly; with will-power, patience, and the proper chemicals) but being accurate is not necessarily being honest ... Nor is chronological reporting by any means always the most truthful (each camera has its own veracity) especially when, in all good faith, one cannot truthfully claim to remember what happened accurately ...

There's no doubt in my mind that McMurphy's won, but I'm not sure what.

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

The most work he did on [the urinals] was to run a brush once or twice apiece, singing some song as loud as he could in time to the swishing brush; then he'd splash in some Clorox and he'd be through ... And when the Big Nurse ... came in to check McMurphy's cleaning assignment personally, she brought a little compact mirror and she held it under the rim of the bowls. She walked along shaking her head and saying, "Why, this is an outrage ... an outrage ... " at every bowl. McMurphy sidled right along beside her, winking down his nose and saying in answer, "No; that's a toilet bowl ... a TOILET bowl.

I've never seen crack or a lot of these new drugs. Don't know anything about them. I don't know what they do for you, or whether they do anything good for you or not. But I do still have a lot of faith in the spiritual purity of LSD and pot.

There's nothing worse for a forest than to have all the trees be the same

The world news might not be therapeutic.

The Republican consciousness has no integrity and it falls apart once you check it out. If you're a Christian, why would you want to fry this dude?

Does the Spearmint lose its flavor on the bedpost over night?

The way I remember it the tribe got paid some huge amount."
"That's what they said to him. He said, What can you pay for the way a man lives? He said, What can you pay for the way a man is? They didn't understand.

He had only smiled, condescendingly and therapeutically. "No, Leland, not you. You, and in fact quite a lot of your generation, have in some way been exiled from that particular sanctuary. It's become almost impossible for you to 'go mad' in the classical sense. At one time people conveniently 'went mad' and were never heard from again. Like a character in a romantic novel. But now"--And I think he even went so far as to yawn--"you are too hip to yourself on a psychological level. You are all too intimate with too many of the symptoms of insanity to be caught completely off your guard. Another thing: all of you have a talent for releasing frustration through clever fantasy. And you, you are the worst of the lot on that score. So... you may be neurotic as hell for the rest of your life, and miserable, maybe even do a short hitch at Bellvue and certainly good for another five years as a paying patient--but I'm afraid never completely out." He leaned back in his elegant Lounge-o-Chair. "Sorry to disappoint you but the best I can offer is plain old schizophrenia with delusional tendencies.

We made love. How pedestrian the words look-trite, worn, practically featureless with use-but how can one better describe that which happens when it happens? That creation? That magic blending? I might say we became figures in a mesmerized dance before the rocking talisman of the moon, starting slow, so slow ... a pair of feathers drifting through clear liquid substance of sky ... gradually accelerating, faster and faster and finally into photon existence of pure light ... as my whole straining body burst like fluid electricity into hers.

I don't think you fully understand the public, my friend; in this country, when something is out of order, then the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way.

The best of all possible cages.' Ben stepped back to regard the job with a sad smile. 'What more can one ask?

When I die pin me up against the sky.

I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower. Oh yeah, well I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower TWICE!

I'm accustomed to being top man. I been a bull goose catskinner for every gyppo logging operation in the Northwest and bull goose gambler all the way from Korea, was even bull goose pea weeder on that pea farm at Pendleton
so I figure if I'm bound to be a loony, then I'm bound to be a stompdown dadgum good one.

I used to think we were going to win in the '60s. Nixon went out and I thought we won.

Sweeping the dorm soon's it's empty, I'm after dust mice under his bed when I get a smell of something that makes me realize for the first time since I been in the hospital that the big dorm full of beds, sleeps forty grown men, has always been sticky with a thousand other smells - smells of germicide, zinc ointment, and foot powder, smell of piss and sour old-man manure, of Pablum and eyewash, of musty shorts and socks musty even when they're fresh back from the laundry, the stiff odor of starch in the linen, the acid stench of morning mouths, the banana smell of machine oil, and sometimes the smell of singed hair - but never before now, before he came in, the man smell of dust and dirt from the open fields, and sweat, and work.

The '60s aren't over; they won't be over until the Fat Lady gets high.

You can't really be strong until you see a funny side to things.

If this glorious birth to death hassle is the only hassle we are ever to have ..if our grand exhilarating fight of life is such a tragically short little scrap anyway,compared to the eons of rounds before and after-then why should one want to relinquish even a few precious seconds of it?

When a guy's getting screwed he's got a right to holler. And we've been damn well screwed.

McMurphy tied a chunk of meat to each end of a four-foot string, tossed it into the air, and sent two squawking birds wheeling off, Till death do them part.

But a system made secure by the protective plating of humor and pretense always runs the risk of having its protection get out of hand. A relationship based on jokes invites jokes; jokes about anything
and jokes about anything are now and then bound to cut too close to the truth.

God looks out for fools and niggers.

Listen, wait, and be patient. Every shaman knows you have to deal with the fire that's in your audience's eye.

Out along the dim six-o'clock street, I saw leafless trees standing, striking the sidewalk there like wooden lightning, concrete split apart where they hit, all in a fenced-in ring. An iron line of pickets stuck out of the ground along the front of a tangleweed yard, and on back was a big frame house with a porch, leaning a rickety shoulder hard into the wind so's not to be sent tumbling away a couple of blocks like an empty cardboard grocery box.

It's time to move on to the next step in the psychedelic revolution. We've reached a certain point, but we're not moving any more.

For there is always a sanctuary more, a door that can never be forced, a last inviolable stronghold that can never be taken, whatever the attack; your vote can be taken, you name, you innards, or even your life, but that last stonghold can only be surrendered. And to surrender it for any reason other than love is to surrender love.

Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.

You might hide in some Freudian jungle most of your miserable life, baying at the moon and shouting curses at God, but at the end, right down there at the damned end when it counts ... you would sure as anything clear up just enough to realize the moon you have spent so many years baying at is nothing but the light globe up there on the ceiling, and God is just something placed in your bureau drawer by the Gideon Society. Yes, I sighed again, in the long run insanity would be the same old coldhearted drag of too solid flesh, too many slings and arrows, and too much outrageous fortune.

Good writing ain't necessarily good reading.

Marvelous wonders don't have to happen of a sudden, the way they do in the Arabian Nights. They can also take a long time, like crystals growing, or minds changing, or leaves turning. The trick is to keep an eye peeled, so they don't slip by unappreciated.

But at least I tried

Nobody can help. And the more I think about how nothing can be helped, the faster the fog rolls in.

And I'm glad when it gets thick enough you're lost in it and can let go, and be safe again.

People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.

The same old rain, and, if not welcomed, at least accepted - an old gray aunt who came to visit every winter and stayed till spring. You learn to live with her. You learn to reconcile yourself to the little inconveniences and not get annoyed. You remember she is seldom angry or vicious and nothing to get in a stew about, and if she is a bore and stays overlong you can train yourself not to notice her, or at least not to stew about her. Which

Cafe Owners are more frustrated than the common laborer," Draeger writes. "The common laborer answers only to the foreman; the cafe owner answers to every patron who stops in

The sun was prying up the clouds and lighting the brick front of the hospital rose red. A thin breeze worked at sawing what leaves were left from the oak trees, stacking them neatly agains the wire cyclone fence. There were little brown birds occasionally on the fence: when a puff of leaves would hit the fence the birds would fly off with the wind. It looked at first like the leaves were hitting the fence and turning into birds and flying away.

The secret of being a top-notch con man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make him think he's getting it.

Take what you can use and let the rest go by.

- he's finished with that; it's like an old clock that won't tell time but won't stop neither, with the hands bent out of shape and the face bare of numbers and the alarm bell rusted silent, an old worthless clock that just keeps ticking and cuckooing without meaning nothing.

To hell with facts! We need stories!

But I tried though," he says. "Goddammit, I sure as hell did that much, now, didn't I?

He couldn't seem to get his teeth into anything. Except books. The things in books was darn near more real to him than the things breathing and eating.

He who walks out of step hears another drum.

One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or ten years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold wonders? That's what you wanted to write about, about what you didn't know. So. What mysterious time and place don't we know?
[Remember This: Write What You Don't Know (New York Times Book Review, December 31, 1989)]

When you love someone it is forever, or it was never really love at all.

Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range ... come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River ... The first little washes flashing like thick rushing winds through sheep sorrel and clover, ghost fern and nettle, sheering, cutting ... forming branches. Then, through bear-berry and salmonberry, blueberry and blackberry, the branches crashing into creeks, into streams. Finally, in the foothills, through tamarack and sugar pine, shittim bark and silver spruce - and the green and blue mosaic of Douglas fir -

Memory whispers someplace in that jumbled machinery.

... and if I don't have her to where she don't know whether to shit or go blind, the bet is yours.

He commences to laugh. Nobody can tell exactly why he laughs; there's nothing funny going on. But it's not the way that Public Relation laughs, it's free and loud and it comes out of his wide grinning mouth and spreads in rings bigger and bigger till it's lapping against the walls all over the ward. Not like that fat Public Relation laugh. This sounds real. I realize all of a sudden it's the first laugh I've heard in years. He stands looking at us, rocking back in his boots, and he laughs and laughs. He laces his fingers