Ken Kesey Quotes

“But it's the truth even if it didn't happen.”

— Ken Kesey

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

— Ken Kesey

“What makes people so impatient is what I can't figure; all the guy had to do was wait.”

— Ken Kesey

“When we first broke into that forbidden box in the other dimension, we knew we had discovered something as surprising and powerful as the New World when Columbus came stumbling onto it.”

— Ken Kesey

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

“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

“Allen Ginsberg is a tremendous warrior as time goes by. He's a warrior first and a poet second.”

— 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

“The frontiers we broke into in the '60s are still largely unexplored.”

— Ken Kesey

“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

“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

“The man who seeks revenge digs two graves.”

— Ken Kesey

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

“He was in his chair in the corner, resting a second before he came out for the next round
in a long line of next rounds. The thing he was fighting, you couldn't whip it for good. All you could do was keep on whipping it, till you couldn't come out anymore and somebody else had to take your place.”

— Ken Kesey

“I'd think, 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 then; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted. It don't seem like I ever have been me.”

— Ken Kesey

“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

“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

“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.”

— 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

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

— Ken Kesey

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

— Ken Kesey

“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.”

— Ken Kesey

“The trouble with superheroes is what to do between phone booths.”

— 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

“One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo's nest.”

— Ken Kesey

“Always stay in your own movie.”

— 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

“What a cheery atmosphere, don't you agree?”

— Ken Kesey

“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.”

— 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

“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

“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

“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 ...”

— Ken Kesey

“She likes a rigged game.”

— Ken Kesey

“The more he tries to stop it, the faster it goes. When he lets his hands and face move like they want to and doesn't try to hold them back, they flow and gesture in a way that's real pretty to watch, but when he worries about them and tries to hold back he becomes a wild, jerky puppet doing a high-strung dance. Everything is moving faster and faster, and his voice is speeding up to match.”

— Ken Kesey

“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

“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

“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

“And the redwinged blackbirds sing in the budding greengage plumtree.”

— Ken Kesey

“My friend, that, as anyone can see, is not a hotel; it's a depot.”

— 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

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

— Ken Kesey

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

— 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

“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

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

— 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

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

— Ken Kesey

“But the more I read ... after awhile ... I begin to find they were all writing about the same thing, this same dull old here-today-gone-tomorrow scene ... Shakespeare, Milton, Matthew Arnold, even Baudelaire, even this cat whoever he was that wrote Beowulf ... the same scene for the same reasons and to the same end, whether it was Dante with his pit or Baudelaire with his pot ... the same dull old scene ...”

— Ken Kesey

“Anesthetized time; nothing moves and everything is at once.”

— Ken Kesey