Top 100 Kesey Quotes
#1. 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
#2. I wasn't trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn't have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.
Hunter S. Thompson
#3. 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
#4. Time to wake to a wholesome diet--Marx and Engels, Andy Warhol and Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouak and the Grateful Dead, Sartre and Gide--it was a regimen of semen in the sixties and we never even knew we were choking. [109]
Claire Robson
#5. As I got into my teens, I started reading better books, beginning with the Beats and then the hippie writers, people like Wallace Stegner up in Northern California, and all the political New Journalism stuff, the Boys on the Bus dudes and Ken Kesey.
Stephen Gaghan
#6. 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
#7. God looks out for fools and niggers.
Ken Kesey
#8. 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
#9. Loved. You can't use it in the past tense. Death does not stop that love at all.
Ken Kesey
#10. They can't tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.
Ken Kesey
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. The job of the writer is to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful.
Ken Kesey
#15. 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
#16. I've enjoyed being a famous writer-except that every once in a while you have to write something.
Ken Kesey
#17. He who walks out of step hears another drum.
Ken Kesey
#18. A Man Is Known By The Mice He Keeps
Ken Kesey
#19. All that five thousand kids lived in those five thousand houses, owned by guys that got off the train. The houses looked so much alike that, time and time again, the kids went home by mistake to different houses and different families. Nobody ever noticed.
Ken Kesey
#20. There's something about taking a plow and breaking new ground. It gives you energy.
Ken Kesey
#21. 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
#22. Does one ever play Coltrane for the uninitiated without subconsciously hoping for the worst?
Ken Kesey
#23. 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
#24. The Haight is just a place; the '60s was a spirit.
Ken Kesey
#25. - 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
#26. They're out there. First line of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Ken Kesey
#27. 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
#28. Ocean, Ocean I'll beat you in the end.
Ken Kesey
#29. YOU ARE HEREBY EMPOWERED!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Tom Wolfe
#30. 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
#31. The most basic organizing principle was pretty straightforward, and is frankly pretty common: the shorter of what are by my lights the two most engaging stories goes first, the longer of the two goes at the end, and everything else goes in the middle.
Roy Kesey
#32. 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
#33. Sometimes I looked at them and sometimes they looked at me, but rarely did we look at one another.
Ken Kesey
#34. 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
#35. Good writing ain't necessarily good reading.
Ken Kesey
#36. 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
#38. Society is what decides who's sane and who isn't, so you got to measure up.
Ken Kesey
#39. ... 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. What can you pay for the way a man lives? What can you pay for what a man is?
Ken Kesey
#44. To Vik Lovell who told me dragons did not exist, then led me to their lairs ...
Ken Kesey
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. They are in contact on a high-voltage wavelength of hate ...
Ken Kesey
#48. You can't really be strong until you see a funny side to things.
Ken Kesey
#49. Good writin' ain't necessarily good readin'.
Ken Kesey
#50. 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
#51. Don't say it ... I've seen too many loves sundered by too much needless honesty.
Ken Kesey
#52. Rules? PISS ON YOUR FUCKING RULES!
Ken Kesey
#53. 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
#54. 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
#56. 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
#57. What we hoped was that we could stop the coming end of the world.
Ken Kesey
#58. He Who Marches Out Of Step Hears Another Drum
Ken Kesey
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Thursday," McMurphy says again. "Looooo," yells that guy upstairs. "That's
Ken Kesey
#62. They did type me as a horror writer, but I have been able to do all sorts of things within that framework.
Ken Kesey
#63. What a cheery atmosphere, don't you agree?
Ken Kesey
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. What makes people so impatient is what I can't figure; all the guy had to do was wait.
Ken Kesey
#67. The world news might not be therapeutic.
Ken Kesey
#68. 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
#69. 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.
Ken Kesey
#70. 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
#71. Listen, wait, and be patient. Every shaman knows you have to deal with the fire that's in your audience's eye.
Ken Kesey
#72. Nobody's gonna convince me I can't do something till I try it." -- McMurphy
Ken Kesey
#73. Never before did I realize that mental illness could have the aspect of power, power. Think of it: perhaps the more insane a man is, the more powerful he could become. Hitler an example. Fair makes the old brain reel, doesn't it?
Ken Kesey
#74. If you're paying attention to human interactions - to the gap between who we are and who we think we are, or the gap between what happened and what we remember - you're going to end up thinking (obliquely or otherwise) about what it means to act ethically, and I think that's all to the good.
Roy Kesey
#75. 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
#76. The game goes round and round, to the rattle of dice and the shuffle of play money.
Ken Kesey
#77. The trouble with superheroes is what to do between phone booths.
Ken Kesey
#78. Always stay in your own movie.
Ken Kesey
#79. People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.
Ken Kesey
#80. But I tried though," he says. "Goddammit, I sure as hell did that much, now, didn't I?
Ken Kesey
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Take what you can use and let the rest go by.
Ken Kesey
#85. It isn't by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world ... by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.
Ken Kesey
#86. If grass were legalized, it would help our drug problem enormously.
Ken Kesey
#87. To hell with facts! We need stories!
Ken Kesey
#88. The fundamentalists have taken the fun out of the mental.
Ken Kesey
#89. I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower. Oh yeah, well I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower TWICE!
Ken Kesey
#90. 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
#91. Allen Ginsberg is a tremendous warrior as time goes by. He's a warrior first and a poet second.
Ken Kesey
#92. 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
#93. Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing.
Ken Kesey
#94. And the redwinged blackbirds sing in the budding greengage plumtree.
Ken Kesey
#95. 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
#96. Memory whispers someplace in that jumbled machinery.
Ken Kesey
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. I think apparatus burned out all over the ward trying to adjust to her come busting in like she did-took electronic readings on her and calculated they weren't built to handle something like this on the ward, and just burned out, like machines committing suicide.
Ken Kesey
#100. 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
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