Ken Kesey Quotes - Page 4

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?

Now, you’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus.

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.

There’s no doubt in my mind that McMurphy’s won, but I’m not sure what.

I lay in bed the night before the fishing trip and thought it over, about my being deaf, about the years of not letting on I heard what was said, and I wonder if I can ever act any other way again. But I remembered one thing: it wasn't me that started acting deaf; it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.

When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.

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

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

I believe that a man should be... as big as he feels it in him to be!

I've never seen crack or a lot of these new drugs. Don't know anything about them. I don't know what they do for you, or whether they do anything good for you or not. But I do still have a lot of faith in the spiritual purity of LSD and pot.

The Grateful Dead are faster than light drive.

The '60s aren't over; they won't be over until the Fat Lady gets high.

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.

I've been to too many Dead concerts. There've been smokin' holes where my memory used to be.

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

High high in the hills , high in a pine tree bed. She's tracing the wind with that old hand, counting the clouds with that old chant, Three geese in a flock one flew east one flew west one flew over the cuckoo's nest

What do you think you are, for Chrissake, crazy or somethin'? Well you're not! You're not! You're no crazier than the average asshole out walkin' around on the streets and that's it.

A sound of cornered-animal fear and hate and surrender and defiance . . . like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn't care about anything but himself and his dying.

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

But if the strength ain't real, I recall thinking the very last thing that day, before I finally passed out, then the weakness sure enough is. Weakness is true and real. I used to accuse the kid of faking his weakness. But faking proves the weakness is real. Or you wouldn't be so weak as to fake it. No, you can't ever fake being weak. You can only fake being strong. . .

turns me on so loud it's like no sound, everybody yelling at me hands over their ears from behind a glass wall, faces working around in talk circles but no sound from the mouths. my sound soaks up all other sound.

The dead's dead ... get 'em in the ground and look to the live ones.

But he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain.

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.

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.