A Quote by Ken Kesey

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.
've had good friends who got married after they've been together for years and they've said that it was the "next step" for them. Or, they've said, "You just can't bail out anymore." And I've wondered, What made you think you could just bail out before [the wedding]? You don't invest that kind of time and energy with somebody and then just go, "All right, see you later."
I hope I can improve. I'm far from perfect. Sometimes, I wonder what would happen if I fought myself. I think it would be a one-round KO. But if I was fighting myself, I know I could take my best punch. No, make that two rounds. I would knock myself out in two rounds.
Sleep with Seth Mortensen? Good grief. It was the most preposterous thing I'd ever heard. It was appalling. If I absorbed his life force, there was no telling how long it'd be until his next book came out.
If you attack a mathematical problem directly, very often you come to a dead end, nothing you do seems to work and you feel that if only you could peer round the corner there might be an easy solution. There is nothing like having somebody else beside you, because he can usually peer round the corner.
You must know that in any moment a decision you make can change the course of your life forever, the very next person who you stand behind in line or sit next to on an aeroplane, the very next phone call you make or receive, the very next movie you see or book you read or page you turn could be the one single thing that causes the floodgates to open, and all of the things that you've been waiting for to fall into place.
We just have to go to that next class, read that next chapter, help that next person. You simply have to do that next good thing, and before you know it, you're living a good life.
Fighters don't just fight. Not the good ones who have long, long success. The guys who make championship runs. The guys who fight for world titles. They get fizzled out, chewed up and spit out like a revolving door and then the next guy or the next female comes in to take their spot.
For many, many years, I was always whipping up things in order to keep myself busy and moving ever forward and saying, 'What's next? What's next? What's next?' I like the equanimity that comes with my age. I don't have big highs, and I don't have big lows. Even if this job goes away tomorrow, the nonstop ambition is a thing of the past for me. I've mellowed
You never know when the next person to shake your hand at an autograph session, or the next guy you bump into on line at the pizza parlor, that could be your best friend for the rest of your life. Or it could be the person that two years later pushes you out of the way of a speeding bus. I mean, you just don't know.
Besides the obvious difference, there was not much distinction between losing a best friend and losing a lover: it was all about intimacy. One moment, you had someone to share your biggest triumphs and fatal flaws with; the next minute, you had to keep them bottled inside. One moment, you'd start to call her to tell her a snippet of news or to vent about your awful day before realizing you did not have that right anymore; the next, you could not remember the digits of her phone number.
We had no irony when it came to girls, though. There was just no time to develop it. One moment they weren't there, not in any form that interested us, anyway, and the next you couldn't miss them; they were everywhere, all over the place. One moment you wanted to clonk them on the head for being your sister, or someone else's sister, and the next you wanted to....actually, we didn't know what we wanted next, but it was something. Almost overnight, all these sisters (there was no other kind of girl, not yet)had become interesting, disturbing, even.
In publishing books and winning awards, it's like you've enjoyed this meal, you know, two months ago. How long can you be nourished by thinking about it? You've already ingested it, and you've excreted it, and that was two months ago. You had this fabulous meal. It's not going to keep you satiated today. You have to go out and get your next meal. For me, that's writing. I have to go out and hunt my next meal.
Eventually, to get through school, I would make good meaningless blobs if I had to. And so they thought I was falling in with them and stuff like that. But on the playground, kids would come up to me and say, "I need three Supermans and a Captain Midnight by four o'clock because I'm going to sell them to somebody else." So I'd take all their lunch money and whip these things out, and they'd have to stick them in their underwear to get the pictures home, because if the teacher ever found out about that.
One thing we did well the whole tournament was keep fighting. And no matter what happened the point before, missed opportunity, missed easy shot, we just played the next point and blocked it out of our mind. That's why we're the champs.
It"s good to keep wide-open ears and listen to what everybody else has to say, but when you come to make a decision, you have to weigh all of what you"ve heard on its own, and place it where it belongs, and come to a decision for yourself; you"ll never regret it. But if you form the habit of taking what someone else says about a thing without checking it out for yourself, you"ll find that other people will have you hating your friends and loving your enemies.
I tell young people that people aren't just going to flock to you as your mentors. You have to seek them out. It could be your next-door neighbor; it could be somebody upstairs from you, somebody down the block from you. An aunt or an uncle. Some relative. A parent.
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