Kesey Quotes & Sayings

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

If somebody'd of come in and took a look, men watching a blank TV, a fifty-year old woman hollering and squealing at the back of their heads about discipline and order and recriminations, they'd of thought the whole bunch was crazy as loons. — Ken Kesey

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

I'll trim you babies like little lambs — Ken Kesey

I'd wander for days in the fog, scared I'd never see another thing, then there'd be that door, opening to show me the mattress padding on the other side to stop out the sounds, the men standing in a line like zombies among shiny copper wires and tubes pulsing light, and the bright scrape of arcing electricity. I'd take my place in the line and wait my turn at the table. The table shaped like a cross, with shadows of a thousand murdered men printed on it, silhouette wrists and ankles running under leather straps sweated green with use, a silhouette neck and head running up to a silver band goes across the forehead. And a technician at the controls beside the table looking up from his dial and down the line and pointing at me with a rubber glove. — Ken Kesey

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

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. — Ken Kesey

Man is certain of nothing but his ability to fail. It is the deepest faith we have, and the unbeliever- the blasphemer, the dissenter- will stimulate in us the most righteous of furies. — Ken Kesey

I can't help it. I was born a miscarriage. I had so many insults I died. I was born dead. I can't help it. I'm tired. I'm give out trying. You got chances. I had so many insults I was born dead. You got it easy. I was born dead an' life was hard. I'm tired. I'm tired out talking and standing up. I been dead fifty-five years." The — Ken Kesey

To be just without being mad (and the madder you get the madder you get), to be peaceful without being stupid, to be interested without being compulsive, to be happy without being hysterical ... smoke grass. — 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

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

That ain't me, that ain't my face. It wasn't even me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn't even really me them; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted. — Ken Kesey

I went to see the Beatles last month ... And I heard 20,000 girls screaming together at the Beatles ... and I couldn't hear what they were screaming, either ... But you don't have to ... They're screaming Me! Me! Me! Me! ... I'm Me! ... That's the cry of the ego, and that's the cry of this rally! ... Me! Me! Me! Me! ... And that's why wars get fought ... ego ... because enough people want to scream Pay attention to Me ... Yep, you're playing their game ... — Tom Wolfe

They wouldn't be so cocky if they knew what me and the moon have going. — Ken Kesey

I see he had his shorts on under the towel all along.
I think for a fact that she'd rather he'd of been stark naked under that towel than had on those shorts. She's glaring at those big white whales leaping round on his shorts in pure wordless outrage. — Ken Kesey

He knew you can't really be strong until you can see a funny side of things. — Ken Kesey

I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound. — Ken Kesey

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

Society is what decides who's sane and who isn't, so you got to measure up. — Ken Kesey

The trouble with superheroes is what to do between phone booths. — Ken Kesey

LSD lets you in on something. When you're tripping, the idea of race disappears; the idea of sex disappears; you don't even know what species you are sometimes. And I don't know of anybody who hasn't come back from that being more humane, more thoughtful, more understanding. — Ken Kesey

Alarm, when used for anything less than a fire or an air attack, is certain to muddle the mind, unsettle the senses, and, in most cases, more than double the danger. — Ken Kesey

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. — Ken Kesey

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

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

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

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 - — Ken Kesey

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

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

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

Maybe he couldn't understand why we weren't able to laugh yet, but he knew you can't really be strong until you see a funny side to things. In fact, he worked so hard at pointing out the funny side of things that I was wondering a little if maybe he was blind to the other side, if maybe he wasn't able to see what it was that parched laughter deep inside your stomach. Maybe the guys weren't able to see it either, just feel the pressures of the different beams and frequencies coming from all directions, working to push and bend you one way or another, feel the Combine at work - but I was able to see it. — 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

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. — Ken Kesey

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

The Grateful Dead are our religion. This is a religion that doesn't pay homage to the God that all the other religions pay homage to. — Ken Kesey

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

A person has all sorts of lags built into him Kesey is saying. Once the most basic is the sensory lag the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it takes if you are the most alert person alive and most people are a lot slower than that ... You can't go any faster than that ... We are all doomed to spend the rest of our lives watching a movies of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1 30th of a second ago. We think we are in the present but we aren't. The present we know is only a movies of the past and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means. — Tom Wolfe

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

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

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

Nowhere else in history has there ever been a flag that stands for the right to burn itself. This is the fractal of our flag. It stands for the right to destroy itself. — 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

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

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

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

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

For whatever reason, thus far it's been important to me not to write that kind of collection. Which means that I've spent months playing tic-tac-notecard, trying to get the stories in an order whereby stories that are similar in any given way (diction, narrative stance, setting, plot) are separated by others that aren't. — Roy Kesey

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

You can make a mark across the night with the tip of an embered stick, and you can actually see it fixed in its finity. You can be absolutely sure of its treacherous impermanence. And that is all. — Ken Kesey

The flock gets sight of a spot of blood on some chicken and they all go to peckin' at it, see, till they rip the chicken to shreds, blood and bones and feathers. But usually a couple of the flock gets spotted in the fracas, then it's their turn. And a few more gets spots and gets pecked to death, and more and more. Oh, a peckin' party can wipe out the whole flock in a matter of a few hours, buddy, I seen it. A mighty awesome sight. The only way to prevent it - with chickens - is to clip blinders on them. So's they can't see. — Ken Kesey

We should absolutely be concerned with ethical questions - to exactly the same degree as everyone else. It's never my intention to sneak any kind of sermon into a story - I've got no business preaching, and besides, that kind of thing plays poorly in fiction, always has. — Roy Kesey

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. — Ken Kesey

We'd just shared the last beer and slung the empty can out the window at a stop sign and were just waiting back to get the feel of the day, swimming in that kind of tasty drowsiness that comes over you after a day of going hard at something you enjoy doing
half sunburned and half drunk and keeping awake only because you wanted to savor the taste as long as you could. — 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

She asked if we were calm enough for her to take off the cuffs, and McMurphy nodded. He had slumped over with his head hung and his elbows between his knees and looked completely exhausted
it hadn't occurred to me that it was just as hard for him to stand straight as it was for me. — Ken Kesey

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. — 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

He's the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people. — Ken Kesey

It is just as much an offense to take offense as it is to give offense. — Ken Kesey

Always stay in your own movie. — Ken Kesey

You must go through a winter to understand. — 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

The biggest experiment there - and I was convinced for a really long time that it was going to fail horribly - had to do with this weird thing I do every now and then. Like everyone else, as a reader there are certain things that really rub me the wrong way in fiction - pet bugbears, let's call them. — Roy Kesey

- 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. — Ken Kesey

If you've got love in your heart, whatever you do from that moment out is likely to be right. If you've got that one true note ringing inside you, then whatever you do is going to be OK. — Ken Kesey

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

I can't do nothing for you either, Billy. You know that. None of us can. You got to understand that as soon as a man goes to help somebody, he leaves himself wide open. He has to be cagey, Billy, you should know that as well as anyone. What could I do? I can't fix your stuttering. I can't wipe the razorblade scars off your wrists or the cigarette burns off the back of your hands. I can't give you a new mother. And as far as the nurse riding you like this, rubbing your nose in your weakness till what little dignity you got left is gone and you shrink up to nothing from humiliation, I can't do anything about that, either. — Ken Kesey

You're either on the bus or off the bus. — 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

I sometimes have these spells of compulsive truth. But as Lady Macbeth would say, "The fit is momentary." — 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

They're out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them. — Ken Kesey

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

They don't have to think. Just be afraid naturally and pulling together. Like specks of mercury rolling into the big piece. Like little specks of mercury rolling into bigger specks and then bigger and then just one piece, and nothing to be scared about or hurt about because you're just a piece of a bigger piece getting bigger rolling across the land into an ocean of mercury ... — Ken Kesey

I've been to too many Dead concerts. There've been smokin' holes where my memory used to be. — Ken Kesey

I been away a long time. — Ken Kesey

What happened, man? Gerry and Ginsberg are cold, and dead, in the ground. Kesey's stoned, and out of town. We've come to the end of the brotherhood song. The children brandish knives upon each other's throats, and their loaded 45's sit snug in lunch boxes nestled safely between Oreo cookies and a ham sandwich. Where are you now, oh ancient hipsters? Raggedy Beats beat down and broken wheel raggedy wheelchairs down ghostly geriatric wards. Where are you now, oh day-glow dreamers? Have you gotten off the bus and into your Mercedes? Did you get that second mortgage, and bear your fattened little babies? Where is that girl with flowers in her hair? Where is the man with revolution in his veins? We ask ourselves "where did we go wrong?" But there is no we. There is you, and then there is I. You do what you need to survive, And I do what I must to stay alive. We stand here Bleeding, slicing each other's wrists With the icy ridges of hardened jagged hearts, Cassandra's — Bearl Brooks

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 ... — Ken Kesey

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

His whole body shakes with the strain as he tries to lift something he knows he can't lift, something everybody knows he can't lift.
But, for just a second, when we hear the cement grind at our feet, we think, by golly, he might do it. — Ken Kesey

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

Because sometimes the only way to keep from losing everything is to give everything up. Because sometimes strength must for the sake of winning give in to
— Ken Kesey

My friend, that, as anyone can see, is not a hotel; it's a depot. — Ken Kesey

When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around. — Ken Kesey

I've enjoyed being a famous writer-except that every once in a while you have to write something. — Ken Kesey

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

You have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep in balance. [Chief Bromden] — Ken Kesey

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

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

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

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

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

He who walks out of step hears another drum. — Ken Kesey