Top 100 Ken Kesey Quotes
#1. 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.
Ken Kesey
#2. 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
#3. Loved. You can't use it in the past tense. Death does not stop that love at all.
Ken Kesey
#4. They can't tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.
Ken Kesey
#5. The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon
Ken Kesey
#6. 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
#7. The job of the writer is to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful.
Ken Kesey
#8. 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
#9. He who walks out of step hears another drum.
Ken Kesey
#10. There's something about taking a plow and breaking new ground. It gives you energy.
Ken Kesey
#11. Does one ever play Coltrane for the uninitiated without subconsciously hoping for the worst?
Ken Kesey
#12. - 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
#13. 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
#14. Ocean, Ocean I'll beat you in the end.
Ken Kesey
#15. 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 ...
Ken Kesey
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. You can't really be strong until you see a funny side to things.
Ken Kesey
#20. 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
#21. Don't say it ... I've seen too many loves sundered by too much needless honesty.
Ken Kesey
#22. Rules? PISS ON YOUR FUCKING RULES!
Ken Kesey
#23. 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
#24. All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.
Ken Kesey
#25. What we hoped was that we could stop the coming end of the world.
Ken Kesey
#26. He knows that there's no better way in the world to aggravate somebody who's trying to make it hard for you than by acting like you're not bothered.
Ken Kesey
#27. Thursday," McMurphy says again. "Looooo," yells that guy upstairs. "That's
Ken Kesey
#28. They did type me as a horror writer, but I have been able to do all sorts of things within that framework.
Ken Kesey
#29. 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
#30. But like always when I try to place my thoughts in the past and hide there, the fear close at hand seeps in through the memory.
Ken Kesey
#31. The world news might not be therapeutic.
Ken Kesey
#32. Things you think you're saying for the first time ever, have been said better before by Shakespeare, though they may need saying again.
Ken Kesey
#33. 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
#34. A bluetick hound bays out there in the fog, running scared and lost because he can't see. No tracks on the ground but the one's he's making, and he sniffs in every direction with his cold red-rubber nose and picks up no scent but his own fear, fear burning down into him like steam.
Ken Kesey
#35. The trouble with superheroes is what to do between phone booths.
Ken Kesey
#36. Always stay in your own movie.
Ken Kesey
#37. But I tried though," he says. "Goddammit, I sure as hell did that much, now, didn't I?
Ken Kesey
#38. You don't lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case.
Ken Kesey
#39. To hell with facts! We need stories!
Ken Kesey
#40. Allen Ginsberg is a tremendous warrior as time goes by. He's a warrior first and a poet second.
Ken Kesey
#41. 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
#42. Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing.
Ken Kesey
#43. And the redwinged blackbirds sing in the budding greengage plumtree.
Ken Kesey
#44. 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
#45. Memory whispers someplace in that jumbled machinery.
Ken Kesey
#46. Of offering more than what I can deliver,
I have a bad habit, it is true.
But I have to offer more than I can deliver,
To be able to deliver what I do.
Ken Kesey
#47. A man has to know he had a choice before he can enjoy what he chose. I know now. That a human has to make it with other humans ... before he can make it with himself.
Ken Kesey
#48. I noticed vaguely that I was getting so's I could see
some good in the life around me.
Ken Kesey
#49. 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
#50. Does the Spearmint lose its flavor on the bedpost over night?
Ken Kesey
#51. 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.
Ken Kesey
#52. You don't plow under the corn because the seed was planted with a neighbor's shovel.
Ken Kesey
#53. I've thought of everything, know what I mean?
Ken Kesey
#54. The best of all possible cages.' Ben stepped back to regard the job with a sad smile. 'What more can one ask?
Ken Kesey
#55. 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
#56. He knew you can't really be strong until you can see a funny side of things.
Ken Kesey
#57. You can't really be strong until you can see a funny side to things.
Ken Kesey
#58. She walked right on past, ignoring him just like she chose to ignore the way nature had tagged her with those outsized badges of femininity, just like she was above him, and sex, and everything else that's weak and of the flesh.
Ken Kesey
#59. ...younger patients, known as 'Acutes' because the doctors figure them still sick enough to be fixed...
Ken Kesey
#60. You have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep in balance. [Chief Bromden]
Ken Kesey
#61. The '60s aren't over; they won't be over until the Fat Lady gets high.
Ken Kesey
#62. Tricker the Squirrel is the best piece I ever wrote. It's intricate.
Ken Kesey
#63. People don't want other people to get high, because if you get high, you might see the falsity of the fabric of the society we live in.
Ken Kesey
#64. It's the truth, even if it didn't happen ...
... if they don't exist, how can a man see them?
Ken Kesey
#65. But I tried, didn't I? Goddamnit, at least I did that.
Ken Kesey
#66. 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.
Ken Kesey
#67. No, my friend. We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you?
Ken Kesey
#69. 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
Ken Kesey
#70. 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
#71. I want to touch him because I'm one of these queers!
Ken Kesey
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. I was raised a Christian and was a stone-faced acid head.
Ken Kesey
#75. But, gee," the other nurse says, "what on earth would MAKE a man want to do something like disrupt the ward for, Miss Ratched? What possible motive ... ?"
"You seem to forget, MISS Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane.
Ken Kesey
#76. 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
#77. Whoever comes in the door is usually disappointing, but there is always a chance otherwise. And when a key hits the lock, all the heads come up like there's strings on them.
Ken Kesey
#78. Now, you're either on the bus or you're off the bus.
Ken Kesey
#79. 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
#80. When a guy's getting screwed he's got a right to holler. And we've been damn well screwed.
Ken Kesey
#81. 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
#82. I'd take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.
Ken Kesey
#83. 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
#84. He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.
Ken Kesey
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. I used to think we were going to win in the '60s. Nixon went out and I thought we won.
Ken Kesey
#88. The man who seeks revenge digs two graves.
Ken Kesey
#89. I'll trim you babies like little lambs
Ken Kesey
#90. More was revealed in a human face than a human being can bear face to face.
Ken Kesey
#91. There's a lot of people who don't understand the circle crops in England. Pure enigma.
Ken Kesey
#92. There's shames a man can never reason away, though he looks back and piles up reasons over them forty dozen deep. And maybe those are the shames a man never should reason away.
Ken Kesey
#93. They're out there...One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey
#94. What a Life: Give some of us pills to stop a fit, give the rest shock to start one.
Ken Kesey
#95. 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
#96. If you're a Conservative, why aren't you behind conserving the land?
Ken Kesey
#97. Sometimes reading the same page over and over, until one sleepy afternoon something clicked, like a lock unlocking, and she saw those printed doors swing open on a vast house of words.
Ken Kesey
#98. Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.
Ken Kesey
#99. Fascism wants Baptism coast to coast.
Ken Kesey
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
