Ken Kesey Quotes

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

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

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

It's like each face was a sign like one of those "I'm Blind" signs the dago accordion players in Portland hung around their necks, only these signs say "I'm tired" or "I'm scared" or "I'm dying of a bum liver" or "I'm all bound up with machinery and people pushing me alla time." I can read all the signs, it don't make any difference how little the print gets. ~ Ken Kesey

Does one ever play Coltrane for the uninitiated without subconsciously hoping for the worst? ~ Ken Kesey

People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense. ~ Ken Kesey

Which is just another way of blaming, and perhaps the best way, because there is solace and a certain stoical peace in blaming everything on the rain, and then blaming something as uncontrollable as the rain on something as indifferent as the Arm of the Lord.
Because nothing can be done about the rain except blaming. And if nothing can be done about it, why get yourself in a sweat about it? ~ Ken Kesey

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

It's the truth, even if it didn't happen ...
... if they don't exist, how can a man see them? ~ Ken Kesey

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. ~ Ken Kesey

Then old Pete was on his feet. "I'm tired!" was what he shouted, a strong, angry copper tone to his voice that no one had ever heard before. Everyone hushed. They were somehow ashamed. It was as if he had suddenly said something that was real and true and important and it had put all their childish hollering to shame. ~ Ken Kesey

I forget sometimes what laughter can do. ~ Ken Kesey

Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing. ~ Ken Kesey

I've thought of everything, know what I mean? ~ Ken Kesey

If you'll curtail your literary pursuits a moment I'll introduce you to my counterpart and Nemesis; I would be trite and say, 'to my better half,' but I think that phrase indicates some kind of basically equal division, don't you? ~ Ken Kesey

Most merciful God, accept these two poor sinners into your arms. And keep the doors ajar for
the coming of the rest of us, because you are witnessing the end, the absolute, irrevocable, fantastic
end. I've finally realized what is happening. It is our last fling. We are doomed henceforth. Must
screw our courage to the sticking point and face up to our impending fate. We [255] shall be all of us
shot at dawn. One hundred cc's apiece. Miss Ratched shall line us all against the wall, where we,,,
face the terrible maw of a muzzle-loading shotgun which she has loaded with Miltowns! Thorazines!
Libriums! Stelazines! And with a wave of her sword, blooie! Tranquilize all of us completely out of
existence. ~ Ken Kesey

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. ~ Ken Kesey

I will be a sonofabitch if he ain't in here at eleven-thirty at night, fartin' around in the dark with a pair of scissors and a paper sack. ~ Ken Kesey

More was revealed in a human face than a human being can bear face to face. ~ Ken Kesey

He hadn't let what he looked like run his life one way or the other, any more than he'd let the Combine mill him into fitting where they wanted him to fit. ~ Ken Kesey

God looks out for fools and niggers. ~ Ken Kesey

Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing. ~ Ken Kesey

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 ... ~ Ken Kesey

It's like a boulder rolling down a hill - you can watch it and talk about it and scream and say Shit! but you can't stop it. It's just a question of where it's going to go. ~ Tom Wolfe

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! ~ Ken Kesey

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

They're out there...One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ~ Ken Kesey

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. ~ Ken Kesey

Time overlaps itself. A breath breathed from a passing breeze is not the whole wind, neither is it just the last of what has passed and the first of what will come, but is more
let me see
more like a single point plucked on a single strand of a vast spider web of winds, setting the whole scene atingle. That way; it overlaps ... As prehistoric ferns grow from bathtub planters. As a shiny new ax, taking a swing at somebody's next year's split-level pinewood pad, bites all the way to the Civil War. As proposed highways break down through the stacked strata of centuries. ~ Ken Kesey

Memory whispers someplace in that jumbled machinery. ~ Ken Kesey

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. ~ Ken Kesey

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. ~ Ken Kesey

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)] ~ Ken Kesey

Always stay in your own movie. ~ Ken Kesey

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

And the redwinged blackbirds sing in the budding greengage plumtree. ~ Ken Kesey

YOU ARE HEREBY EMPOWERED!!!!!!!!!!!!! ~ Tom Wolfe

It's fogging a little, but I won't slip off and hide in it. No ... never again ... ~ Ken Kesey

It's like… that big red hand of McMurphy's is reaching into the fog and dropping down and dragging the men up by their hands, dragging them blinking into the open. First one, then another, then the next. Right on down the line of Acutes, dragging them out of the fog till there they stand, all twenty of them, raising not just for watching TV, but against the Big Nurse, against her trying to send McMurphy to Disturbed, against the way she's talked and acted and beat them down for years. ~ Ken Kesey

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

I noticed vaguely that I was getting so's I could see
some good in the life around me. ~ Ken Kesey

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. ~ Ken Kesey

Turns me on so loud it's like no sound, everybody yelling at me hands over their ears from behind a glass wall, faces working around in talk circles but no sound from the mouths. my sound soaks up all other sound. ~ Ken Kesey

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. ~ Ken Kesey

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? ~ Ken Kesey

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. ~ Ken Kesey

...younger patients, known as 'Acutes' because the doctors figure them still sick enough to be fixed... ~ Ken Kesey

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. ~ Ken Kesey

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. ~ Ken Kesey

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. ~ Ken Kesey

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

Does the Spearmint lose its flavor on the bedpost over night? ~ Ken Kesey

Truth doesn't run on time like a commuter train, though time may run on truth. And the Scenes Gone By and the Scenes to Come flow blending together in the sea-green deep while Now spreads in circles on the surface. ~ Ken Kesey

Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols. ~ Tom Wolfe

Somebody has to be the pioneer and leave the marks for others to follow ... you've got to have some faith in what you're trying to do. It's easy to have faith as long as it goes along with what you already know. But you've got to have faith in us all the way ... ~ Tom Wolfe

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. ~ Ken Kesey

They did type me as a horror writer, but I have been able to do all sorts of things within that framework. ~ Ken Kesey

To hell with facts! We need stories! ~ Ken Kesey

Loved. You can't use it in the past tense. Death does not stop that love at all. ~ Ken Kesey

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

They are in contact on a high-voltage wavelength of hate ... ~ Ken Kesey

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. ~ Ken Kesey

I been away a long time. ~ Ken Kesey

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

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. ~ Ken Kesey

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. ~ Ken Kesey

If you don't watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite. ~ Ken Kesey

Tricker the Squirrel is the best piece I ever wrote. It's intricate. ~ Ken Kesey

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

The man who seeks revenge digs two graves. ~ Ken Kesey

Win or lose, the crows always laughed
the hard, old jaded laughter that came of looking at the world with a black and practiced eye. From the less skillful the laugh might have hinted of despair, or silliness, like the magpies', but the crows were masters of the wry outlook, and Viv never heard them but what she followed their expert lead and laughed along
they knew the secret of black, that it could not be made blacker, and if neither could it be made lighter, it could still be made funnier. ~ Ken Kesey

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. ~ Ken Kesey

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

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. ~ Ken Kesey

Mostly, I'd just like to look over the country around the gorge again, just to bring some of it clear in my mind again. I been away a long time. ~ Ken Kesey

But it's the truth even if it didn't happen. ~ Ken Kesey

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. ~ Arthur Bradford

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. ~ Ken Kesey

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. ~ Ken Kesey

While his relaxed, good-natured voice doled out his life for us to live a rollicking past full of kid fun and drinking buddies and loving women and barroom battles over meager honors-for all of us to dream ourselves into. ~ Ken Kesey

What a Life: Give some of us pills to stop a fit, give the rest shock to start one. ~ Ken Kesey

The Big Nurse is able to set the wall clock at whatever speed she wants by just turning one of those dials in the steel door; she takes a notion to hurry things up, she turns the speed up, and those hands whip around that disk like spokes in a wheel. The scene in the picture-screen windows goes through rapid changes of light to show morning, noon, and night - throb off and on furiously with day and dark, and everybody is driven like mad to keep up with that passing of fake time; awful scramble of shaves and breakfasts and appointments and lunches and medications and ten minutes of night so you barely get your eyes closed before the dorm light's screaming at you to get up and start the scramble again, go like a sonofabitch this way, going through the full schedule of a day maybe twenty times an hour, till the Big Nurse sees everybody is right up to the breaking point, and she slacks off on the throttle, eases off the pace on that clock-dial, like some kid been fooling with the moving-picture projection machine and finally got tired watching the film run at ten times its natural speed, got bored with all that silly scampering and insect squeak of talk and turned it back to normal. ~ Ken Kesey

To hell with that. A man goin' fishing with two whores from Portland don't have to take that crap. ~ Ken Kesey

Had Ken Kesey opened Electric Kool-Aid stands on every college campus in the country, it would have made a lesser contribution than Life to the creation of that era of unprecedented foment we like to call the sixties. ~ Tom Robbins

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. ~ Ken Kesey

It wasn't the practices, I don't think, it was the feeling that the great, deadly, pointing forefinger of society was pointing at me
and the great voice of millions chanting, 'Shame. Shame. Shame.' It's society's way of dealing with someone different. ~ Ken Kesey

Alongside the statement about one man's poison being another man's high, one might as well add that one man's saint can be another man's sore and one man's hero can turn out to be that man's biggest hangup. ~ Ken Kesey

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

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. ~ Ken Kesey

The reverberation often exceeds through silence the sound that sets it off; the reaction occasionally outdoes by way of repose the event that stimulated it; and the past not uncommonly takes a while to happen, and some long time to figure out. ~ Ken Kesey

You've got to get out
and pray to the sky
to appreciate the sunshine;
otherwise
you're just a lizard
standing there
with the sun shining on you. ~ Ken Kesey

What a cheery atmosphere, don't you agree? ~ Ken Kesey

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

They're out there. First line of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. ~ Ken Kesey

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. ~ Ken Kesey

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. ~ Ken Kesey

You must go through a winter to understand. ~ Ken Kesey

I make out a schoolbus ... glowing orange, green, magenta, lavender, chlorine blue, every fluorescent pastel imaginable in thousands of designs, both large and small, like a cross between Fernand Liger and Dr. Strange, roaring together and vibrating off each other as if somebody had given Hieronymous Bosch fifty buckets of day-glo paint and a 1939 International Harvester schoolbus and told him to go to it. ~ Tom Wolfe

You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself ~ Ken Kesey

I realized Jack [Kerouac] was deeply committed to writing. Kesey was just as deeply committed to living and experiencing the lives of others; for him writing was just a part of living. ~ Sterling Lord