Top 200 Ken Kesey Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 5 of 5

201. “He didn’t feel he had the ability to follow her into those reveries or the right to call her back out.”

— Ken Kesey

202. “Our thermosed lives are, at best nine-tenths of the time padded by vacuum and sealed by silvered silicon, but, for all their artificiality, we are generally able to find means for unstoppering them now and then, and enjoy at least some portion of addlepated freedom.”

— Ken Kesey

203. “Rany, nawet chinscy komunisci niejednego by sie mogli od siostry nauczyc!”

— Ken Kesey

204. “I’ve seen a thousand of ‘em, old and young, men and women. Seen ‘em all over the country and in the homes – people who try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow their rules, to live like they want you to. And the best way to do this, to get you to knuckle under, is to weaken you by gettin’ you where it hurts the worst.”

— Ken Kesey

205. “This kept happening, off and on. It’d be bright for a little bit, everything shining like chrome, waxy-looking, polished, then go dark as muddy water.”

— Ken Kesey

206. “When a man showed up you didn’t want to look at his face and he didn’t want to look at his face and he didn’t want to look at yours, because it’s painful to see somebody so clear that it’s like looking inside him, but then neither did you want to to look away and lose him completely. You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it may be, or you could relax and lose yourself.”

— Ken Kesey

207. “He’d traveled in a straight line and completed a circle.”

— Ken Kesey

208. “Now I don’t know what I love any more. I don’t know where the thing I make-pretend leaves off and the thing that’s really there starts up.”

— Ken Kesey

209. “I turned, going back along the planks toward the idling pick-up without saying anything else. I just wanted to be away from people. I didn’t want to have to avoid answering questions about what happened. I didn’t want the questions.”

— Ken Kesey

210. “It’s gonna burn me just that way, finally telling about all this, about the hospital, and her, and the guys – and about McMurphy. I been silent so long now it’s gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please. It’s still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.”

— Ken Kesey

211. “He said, What can you pay for the way a man lives? He said, What can you pay for what a man is? They didn’t understand.”

— Ken Kesey

212. “How,” the moon whispered, “can you be sure it is lost? Until you try to find it?”

— Ken Kesey

213. “And becomes aware of her image once more, vaguely reflected in the dirty attic window: what does it mean, all this concern about our images? It means this is the only way we ever see ourselves; looking out, at others, reflected through cobwebs from an attic window.”

— Ken Kesey

214. “What they got on the program for us now, Chief?” he asked. “The boot? The rack? I hope nothing too strenuous, because, man, am I stove up bad!”

— Ken Kesey

215. “That first day still came about as close to undoing me completely, both physically and mentally, as any day had in almost a week.”

— Ken Kesey

216. “Viv feels the hand go bloodless and numb against her neck; startled, she turns to look at his face. There is no expression at all. For a moment he is gone from his face, as though he had fallen somewhere inward, away from her and the old man and the fire, into a remote pool of himself.”

— Ken Kesey

217. “But, oh Viv, right doesn’t make might.”

— Ken Kesey

218. “He keeps trying to drag us out of the fog, out in the open where we’d be easy to get at.”

— Ken Kesey

219. “And we are all surrounded by that skin, and he’s trying to show us some beauty in this condition.”

— Ken Kesey

220. “I love them but I cannot give myself for them.”

— Ken Kesey

221. “But even then, with her prize in tow as she weaves out of the bar, the shield never changes, the expression stays, still somewhere between blunt ferocity and brute pathos.”

— Ken Kesey

222. “In his room Lee wonders how to include all the history that Peters will need to make any sense of the situation.”

— Ken Kesey

223. “We’d just shared the last beer and slung the empty can out the window at a stop sign and were just leaning back to get the feel of the day, swimming in that kind of tasty drowsiness that comes over you after a day of going hard at something you enjoy doing – half sunburned and half drunk and keeping awake only because you wanted to savor the taste as long as you could.”

— Ken Kesey

224. “One of you guys, for cryin’ out loud! This is where you get the edge, don’t you see that? We have to do this – or we’re whipped! Don’t a one of you clucks know what I’m talking about enough to give us a hand? You, Gabriel? George? No? You, Chief, what about you?”

— Ken Kesey

225. “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. I once had a pet pine squirrel named Omar who lived in the cotton secret.”

— Ken Kesey

226. “Hank brooded behind a newspaper with heavy, rumbling silence, and Lee, smoking and staring out of the kitchen window with tragic, defeated eyes and an anemic pallor to his cheeks, didn’t look capable of sustaining the shock of a haircut, let alone the loss of a mouthful of teeth.”

— Ken Kesey

227. “Boy, if you ain’t a case: waiting someday to be a something to a Somebody you don’t even know, yet.”

— Ken Kesey

228. “He had made his trip without quite realizing it.”

— Ken Kesey

229. “One of the reasons for his drinking, Henry said, was Jon’s momma used to make the whole family get down on their knees and pray like fury every time Jon’s daddy would come home boozed. Jon 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 something holy to him and with faith like that Jon grew up religious as a deacon.”

— Ken Kesey

230. “And the more I think about how nothing can be helped, the faster the fog rolls in.”

— Ken Kesey

231. “Lufa drgala mi jak pies srajacy pestkami brzoskwin.”

— Ken Kesey

232. “When a guy’s getting screwed he’s got a right to holler. And we’ve been damn well screwed.”

— Ken Kesey