Top 200 Ken Kesey Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Living is the purpose of life, And meaning can be found therein. I finds thou. Thou becomes it. And it begins again.”

— Ken Kesey

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “Nobody complains about all the fog. I know why, now: as bad as it is, you can slip back in it and feel safe. That’s what McMurphy can’t understand, us wanting to be safe. He keeps trying to drag us out of the fog, out in the open where we’d be easy to get at.”

— Ken Kesey

107. “Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing.”

— Ken Kesey

108. “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

109. “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

110. “I forget sometimes what laughter can do.”

— Ken Kesey

111. “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

112. “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

113. “Ratched shall line us all against the wall, where we’ll 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

114. “He shakes the hands of Wheelers and Walkers and Vegetables, shakes hands that he has to pick up out of laps like picking up dead birds, mechanical birds, wonders of tiny bones and wires that have run down and fallen. Shakes hands with everybody he comes to except Big George the water freak, who grins and shies back from that unsanitary hand, so McMurphy just salutes him and says to his own right hand as he walks away, “Hand, how do you suppose that old fellow knew all the evil you been into?”

— Ken Kesey

115. “Fascism wants Baptism coast to coast.”

— Ken Kesey

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Ken Kesey

119. “Tricker the Squirrel is the best piece I ever wrote. It’s intricate.”

— Ken Kesey

120. “The fundamentalists have taken the fun out of the mental.”

— Ken Kesey

121. “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

122. “What a cheery atmosphere, don’t you agree?”

— Ken Kesey

123. “The Haight is just a place; the ’60s was a spirit.”

— Ken Kesey

124. “You must go through a winter to understand.”

— Ken Kesey

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

— Ken Kesey

126. “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

127. “There’ve been a lot more people hurt on astro-turf than grass.”

— Ken Kesey

128. “He’s like an old clock the won’t tell time but won’t stop neither with the hands bend out of shape and the face bare of numbers and the alarm rusted silent, an old worthless clock that keeps ticking and cuckooing without meaning nothing.”

— Ken Kesey

129. “I’ve enjoyed being a famous writer-except that every once in a while you have to write something.”

— Ken Kesey

130. “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

131. “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

132. “You don’t plow under the corn because the seed was planted with a neighbor’s shovel.”

— Ken Kesey

133. “The Republican consciousness has no integrity and it falls apart once you check it out. If you’re a Christian, why would you want to fry this dude?”

— Ken Kesey

134. “Thursday,” McMurphy says again. “Looooo,” yells that guy upstairs. “That’s.”

— Ken Kesey

135. “They’ve still got their problems, just like all of us. They’re still sick men in lots of ways. But at least there’s that: they are sick men now. No more rabbits, Mack. Maybe they can be well men someday. I can’t say.”

— Ken Kesey

136. “If grass were legalized, it would help our drug problem enormously.”

— Ken Kesey

137. “Maybe he couldn’t understand why we weren’t able to laugh yet, but he knew you can’t really be strong until you can see a funny side to things.”

— Ken Kesey

138. “Sometimes I looked at them and sometimes they looked at me, but rarely did we look at one another.”

— Ken Kesey

139. “Nobody’s gonna convince me I can’t do something till I try it.” – McMurphy.”

— Ken Kesey

140. “Truth doesn’t run on time like a commuter train.”

— Ken Kesey

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

— Ken Kesey

142. “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

143. “When you’re around the whole Dead scene, they’re there as a tribal thing; they’re there as part of a rendezvous and a pow-wow.”

— Ken Kesey

144. “And the forest at night might be beautiful, but if it was dark how was a man to know that?”

— Ken Kesey

145. “A Man Is Known By The Mice He Keeps.”

— Ken Kesey

146. “Sometimes I looked at them and sometimes they looked at me, but rarely did we look at one another. It was too naked and painful. More was revealed in a human face than a human being can bear, face-to-face.”

— Ken Kesey

147. “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

148. “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

149. “Major part of the Southern California pop scene in the 60s “People think that love is an emotion. Love is good sense.””

— Ken Kesey

150. “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