Ken Kesey Quotes

There's something about taking a plow and breaking new ground. It gives you energy.

You're making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You're not crazy the way they think. Yes...I see....

I don't think I can give you an answer. Oh, I could give you Freudian reasons with fancy talk, and t...

Society is what decides who's sane and who isn't, so you got to measure up.

The Grateful Dead are our religion. This is a religion that doesn't pay homage to the God that all t...

You can't really be strong until you can see a funny side to things.

People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.

I can’t do nothing for you either, Billy. You know that. None of us can. You got to understand that ...

I don't think you fully understand the public, my friend; in this country, when something is out of ...

I been silent so long now it’s gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling t...

Which is just another way of blaming, and perhaps the best way, because there is solace and a certai...

The secret of being a top-notch con man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make h...

While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top,spreading his laug...

I'd think, maybe he truly is something extraordinary. He's what he is, that's it. Maybe that makes h...

All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends t...

It's the truth, even if it didn't happen......if they don't exist, how can a man see them?

I realized I still had my eyes shut. I had shut them when I put my face to the screen, like I was sc...

You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fo...

He knew you can't really be strong until you can see a funny side of things.

Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.

He’s like an old clock the won’t tell time but won’t stop neither with the hands bend out of shape a...

I discovered at an early age that I was - shall we be kind and say different? It's a better, more ge...

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

They can't tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.

The stars up close to the moon were pale they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of th...

We'd just shared the last beer and slung the empty can out the window at a stop sign and were just w...

I'm accustomed to being top man. I been a bull goose catskinner for every gyppo logging operation in...

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 ...

Nobody's gonna convince me I can't do something till I try it." -- McMurphy

He's the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people.

That ain't me, that ain't my face. It wasn't even me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn't eve...

It isn't by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by ge...

In any given situation there will always be more dumb people than smart people. We ain't many!

It's time to move on to the next step in the psychedelic revolution. We've reached a certain point, ...

You have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to the world fr...

Loved. You can't use it in the past tense. Death does not stop that love at all.

To hell with facts! We need stories!

The truth doesn't have to do with cruelty, the truth has to do with mercy.

Nowhere else in history has there ever been a flag that stands for the right to burn itself. This is...

You can't really be strong until you see a funny side to things.

He couldn't seem to get his teeth into anything. Except books. The things in books was darn near mor...

But if the strength ain't real, I recall thinking the very last thing that day, before I finally pas...

. . .sometimes reading the same page over and over, until one sleepy afternoon something clicked, li...

...I think apparatus burned out all over the ward trying to adjust to her come busting in like she d...

I don't seem able to get it straight in my mind....

I realized I still had my eyes shut. I had shut them when I put my face to the screen, like I was sc...

Man is certain of nothing but his ability to fail. It is the deepest faith we have, and the unbeliev...

But I remember one thing: it wasn't me that started acting deaf, it was people that first started ac...

It’s fall coming, I thought, I can smell that sour-molasses smell of silage, clanging the air like a...

He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just t...

One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is ...

Something moved on the grounds down beneath my window — cast a long spider of shadow out across the ...

To Vik Lovell who told me dragons did not exist, then led me to their lairs ...

turns me on so loud it's like no sound, everybody yelling at me hands over their ears from behind a ...

If somebody'd of come in and took a look, men watching a blank TV, a fifty-year old woman hollering ...

The most work he did on [the urinals] was to run a brush once or twice apiece, singing some song as ...

One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is ...