Top 200 Ken Kesey Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Ken Kesey

205. “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

206. “Estar perdido no resulta tan terrible.”

— Ken Kesey

207. “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

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

— Ken Kesey

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Ken Kesey

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

— Ken Kesey

213. “Besides, there are some things that can’t be the truth even if they did happen.”

— Ken Kesey

214. “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

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

— Ken Kesey

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

— Ken Kesey

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

— Ken Kesey

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

— Ken Kesey

220. “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

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

— Ken Kesey

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Ken Kesey

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

— Ken Kesey

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

— Ken Kesey

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

— Ken Kesey

228. “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

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

— Ken Kesey

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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