Top 200 Ken Kesey Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Ken Kesey

153. “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

154. “I still had my own notions. How McMurphy was a giant come out of the sky to save us from the combine that was networking the land with copper wire and crystal.”

— Ken Kesey

155. “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

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

— Ken Kesey

157. “Does one ever play Coltrane for the uninitiated without subconsciously hoping for the worst?”

— Ken Kesey

158. “Reality is greater than the sum of its parts, also a damn sight holier.”

— Ken Kesey

159. “Chang! With light and sound and numbers round and round in a whirlwind, and maybe you win with what you end up with and maybe you lose and have to play again. Pay the man for another spin, son, pay the man.”

— Ken Kesey

160. “He wants something from me. He doesn’t know that the only thing I have left is the hollow of something gone.”

— Ken Kesey

161. “All right. Then this is the whole shebang, boys, right here underfoot. Give up and admit it.”

— Ken Kesey

162. “He who- what was it?- walks out of step, hears another drum.”

— Ken Kesey

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

— Ken Kesey

164. “The big, hard body had a tough grip on life. It fought a long time against having it taken away, flailing and thrashing around so much I finally had to lie full length on top of it and scissor the kicking legs with mine while I mashed the pillow into the face. I lay there on top of the body for what seemed days.”

— Ken Kesey

165. “Leary can get a part of my mind that’s kind of rusted shut grinding again, just by being around him and talking.”

— Ken Kesey

166. “To know a thing you have to trust what you know, and all that you know, and as far as you know in whatever direction your knowing drags you.”

— Ken Kesey

167. “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

168. “They didn’t mind so much when I was a dumb logger and got into a hassle; that’s excusable, they say, that’s a hard-workin’ feller blowing off steam, they say. But if you’re a gambler, if they know you to get up a back-room game now and then, all you have to do is spit slantwise and you’re a goddamned criminal.”

— Ken Kesey

169. “And sometimes, as you sing, you cannot help feeling that the unheard echoes and tunes forgotten are echoes of other voices and tunes of other singers... in that kind of world.”

— Ken Kesey

170. “Tata zicea ca, daca nu iei seama, oamenii te silesc, intr-un fel sau altul, sa faci ce socotesc ei ca trebuie sa faci, ori sa te indaratnicesti ca un catar si sa faci toate pe dos, in ciuda lor.”

— Ken Kesey

171. “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.”

— Ken Kesey

172. “They wouldn’t be so cocky if they knew what me and the moon had going.”

— Ken Kesey

173. “There’s long spells – three days, years – when you can’t see a thing, know where you are only by the speaker sounding overhead like a bell buoy clanging in the fog. When I can see, the guys are usually moving around as unconcerned as though they didn’t notice so much as a mist in the air. I believe the fog affects their memory some way it doesn’t affect mine.”

— Ken Kesey

174. “Estar perdido no resulta tan terrible.”

— Ken Kesey

175. “No. No, listen. They don’t bust you that way; they work on you ways you can’t fight! They put things in! They install things. They start as quick as they see you’re gonna be big and go to working and installing their filthy machinery when you’re little, and keep on and on and on till you’re fixed!”

— Ken Kesey

176. “She don’t lose on her losses, but she wins on ours. To beat her you don’t have to whip her two out of three or three out of five, but every time you meet. As soon as you let down your guard, as soon as you lose once, she’s won for good. And eventually we all got to lose. Nobody can help that.”

— Ken Kesey

177. “I didn’t say it didn’t make sense, Chief – I just said it was talking crazy.”

— Ken Kesey

178. “We are victims of a matriarchy here, my friend, and the doctor is just as helpless against it as we are.”

— Ken Kesey

179. “A wind came up and broke the sea into green and silver chunks, like a field of glass and chrome, and the boat began to rock and pitch about more... The waves got bigger as we got closer to shore, and from the crests clots of white foam blew swirling up in the wind to join the gulls.”

— Ken Kesey

180. “In the fall when they burn the stubble off the fields the sun gets this dusty hazy color, and the mare’s-tail clouds whipping along near Wakonda Head look like goldenrod bent over by the wind. It’s always real pretty. You can almost hear it ring in the sky.”

— Ken Kesey

181. “Sometimes a manipulator’s own ends are simply the actual disruption of the ward for the sake of disruption. There are such people in our society.”

— Ken Kesey

182. “Or, perhaps, the fellows are ill at ease because they didn’t stick up for their friend. Perhaps they are feeling guilty for the way they once again let her victimize them into being her interrogators. Cheer up, friends, you’ve no reason to feel ashamed. It is all as it should be. It’s not the rabbit’s place to stick up for his fellow. That would have been foolish. No, you were wise, cowardly but wise.”

— Ken Kesey

183. “Meaning: Good night but stay. Viv, silent and slim as a shaft of sleepy light, stay, talk more to me with your articulate eyes. Hank, forget my words behind my words, stay, say some more. This is our chance. This is my chance. Say enough more for love or hate, enough more to make me sure of one or the other. Please stay, please stay .”

— Ken Kesey

184. “It was strange to hear that voice, soft and soothing and warm as a pillow, coming out of a face hard as porcelain.”

— Ken Kesey

185. “You got to understand that as soon as a man goes to help someone, he leaves himself wide open.”

— Ken Kesey

186. “He throws the torn paper from his window into the October breeze and returns to bed. He falls asleep watching the little fragment of light vibrate across his wall, thinking how much more efficient it would be filling an hourglass with photons instead of those unruly grains of sand.”

— Ken Kesey

187. “With eyes like he’s been to the edge and looked over .”

— Ken Kesey

188. “Am I this? Are these mine? These people? These insane people?”

— Ken Kesey

189. “Which one of you claims to be the craziest? Which one is the biggest loony? Who runs these card games.”

— Ken Kesey

190. “She slides through the door with a gust of cold and locks the door behind her and I see her fingers trail across the polished steel – tip of each finger the same color as her lips. Funny orange. Like the tip of a soldering iron. Color so hot or so cold if she touches you with it you can’t tell which.”

— Ken Kesey

191. “Is it that?” she asked in a soft voice, once more examining her hands, “not being sure of that ‘someday’? Or is it not being sure of having that ‘somebody’?”

— Ken Kesey

192. “Era emerso alla vita per forse un minuto cercando di dirci qualcosa, qualcosa che nessuno di noi si curava di ascoltare o cercava di capire, e lo sforzo lo aveva svuotato.”

— Ken Kesey

193. “Man will do away with anything that threatens him with loneliness – even himself.”

— Ken Kesey

194. “And I lay awake for hours, hoping another phone call would give me that opportunity to be alone and unruffled with her.”

— Ken Kesey

195. “I indulged in certain practices that our society regards as shameful. And I got sick. 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

196. “Those who had been in on the night started telling about it with a kind of quiet pride and wonder, the way people tell about seeing a big hotel fire or a dam bursting – very solemn and respectful because the casualties aren’t even counted yet – but the longer the telling went on, the less solemn the fellows got.”

— Ken Kesey

197. “And crying doesn’t always mean need.”

— Ken Kesey

198. “Boney Stokes was this oldtime acquaintance of Henry’s and figured the best way to pass the time of day was by gradually dying.”

— Ken Kesey

199. “You’ve – it seems – no other psychiatric history, Mr. McMurry?” “McMurphy, Doc.” “Oh? But I thought – the nurse was saying – ” He opens the folder again, fishes out those glasses, looks the record over for another minute before he closes it, and puts his glasses back in his pocket. “Yes. McMurphy. That is correct. I beg your pardon.” “It’s okay, Doc. It was the lady there that started it, made the mistake. I’ve known some people inclined to do that.”

— Ken Kesey

200. “But in spite of her efforts to stop the words she can feel some of the need getting through: he doesn’t need me that much, he couldn’t –.”

— Ken Kesey