Top 166 Quotes & Sayings by Ken Kesey - Page 3

Then the trembling starts to get worse. This must be how they begin, he thinks. Freak-outs. Breakdowns. Crack-ups. Eventually shut-ins and finally cross-offs. But first the cover-up . . .

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

He knows that there's no better way in the world to aggravate somebody who's trying to make it hard for you than by acting like you're not bothered.

But the more I read... after awhile... I begin to find they were all writing about the same thing, this same dull old here-today-gone-tomorrow scene... Shakespeare, Milton, Matthew Arnold, even Baudelaire, even this cat whoever he was that wrote Beowulf... the same scene for the same reasons and to the same end, whether it was Dante with his pit or Baudelaire with his pot... the same dull old scene...

She asked if we were calm enough for her to take off the cuffs, and McMurphy nodded. He had slumped over with his head hung and his elbows between his knees and looked completely exhausted--it hadn't occurred to me that it was just as hard for him to stand straight as it was for me.

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

I felt like you can write forever, but you have a short time to raise a family. And I think a family is a lot more important than writing.

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.

Like a cartoon world, where the figures are flat and outlined in black, jerking through some kind of goofy story that might be real funny if it weren't for the cartoon figures being real guys.

What can you pay for the way a man lives? What can you pay for what a man is?

But it's the truth even if it didn't happen.

Don't say it...I've seen too many loves sundered by too much needless honesty.

They did type me as a horror writer, but I have been able to do all sorts of things within that framework.

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 even really me them; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted.

His whole body shakes with the strain as he tries to lift something he knows he can't lift, something everybody knows he can't lift. But, for just a second, when we hear the cement grind at our feet, we think, by golly, he might do it.

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

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.

Things you think you're saying for the first time ever, have been said better before by Shakespeare, though they may need saying again.

Billy here has been talkin' about slicin' his wrists again, so is there seven of you guys who'd like to join him and make it therapeutic?

Anesthetized time; nothing moves and everything is at once.

More was revealed in a human face than a human being can bear face to face.

You, and in fact quite a lot of your generation, have in some way been exiled from that particular sanctuary. It's become almost impossible for someone to "go mad" in the classical sense. At one time people conveniently "went mad" and were never heard from again. Like a character in a romantic novel. But now you are too hip to yourself on a psychological level. You all are too intimate with too many of the symptoms of insanity to be caught completely off your guard.

Ocean, Ocean I'll beat you in the end.

The most work he did on [the urinals] was to run a brush once or twice apiece, singing some song as loud as he could in time to the swishing brush; then he'd splash in some Clorox and he'd be through. ... And when the Big Nurse...came in to check McMurphy's cleaning assignment personally, she brought a little compact mirror and she held it under the rim of the bowls. She walked along shaking her head and saying, "Why, this is an outrage... an outrage..." at every bowl. McMurphy sidled right along beside her, winking down his nose and saying in answer, "No; that's a toilet bowl...a TOILET bowl.

No one's ever dared come out and say it before, but there's not a man among us that doesn't think it, that doesn't feel just as you do about her and the whole business - feel it somewhere down deep in his scared little soul.

I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower. Oh yeah, well I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower TWICE!

- he's finished with that; it's like an old clock that won't tell time but won't stop neither, with the hands bent out of shape and the face bare of numbers and the alarm bell rusted silent, an old worthless clock that just keeps ticking and cuckooing without meaning nothing.

Good writin' ain't necessarily good readin'.

He's got hands so long and white and dainty I think they carved each other out of soap, and sometimes they get loose and glide around in front of him free as two white birds until he notices them and traps them between his knees; it bothers him that he's got pretty hands.

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

I sometimes have these spells of compulsive truth. But as Lady Macbeth would say, "The fit is momentary."

For there is always a sanctuary more, a door that can never be forced, a last inviolable stronghold that can never be taken, whatever the attack; your vote can be taken, you name, you innards, or even your life, but that last stonghold can only be surrendered. And to surrender it for any reason other than love is to surrender love.

Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range . . . come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River . . .

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

But if they don't exist, how can a man see them?

What we hoped was that we could stop the coming end of the world.

But I remember 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

I been away a long time.

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. . .

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.

Men are forever eager to press drink upon those they consider their superiors, hoping thereby to eliminate that distinction between them.... And women, when confronted by superiors, substitute for drink the crippling liquor of their sex.

We made love. How pedestrian the words look-trite, worn, practically featureless with use-but how can one better describe that which happens when it happens? That creation? That magic blending? I might say we became figures in a mesmerized dance before the rocking talisman of the moon, starting slow, so slow... a pair of feathers drifting through clear liquid substance of sky... gradually accelerating, faster and faster and finally into photon existence of pure light... as my whole straining body burst like fluid electricity into hers.

Anti-drug fanatics and cops are the criminals - it's like McCarthyism. They need someone to dislike to distract the public from the really important problems.

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

Alongside the statement about one man's poison being another man's high, one might as well add that one man's saint can be another man's sore and one man's hero can turn out to be that man's biggest hangup.

You seem to forget, Miss Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane.