Ken Kesey Quotes

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

The same old rain, and, if not welcomed, at least accepted — an old gray aunt who came to visit every winter and stayed till spring. You learn to live with her. You learn to reconcile yourself to the little inconveniences and not get annoyed. You remember she is seldom angry or vicious and nothing to get in a stew about, and if she is a bore and stays overlong you can train yourself not to notice her, or at least not to stew about her.

It's fogging a little, but I won't slip off and hide in it. No...never again...

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

We can count how many seeds are in the apple, but not how many apples are in the seed.

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.

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.

It was a sound like . . . I remember thinking . . . a sound kind of like Joe’s little girl Squeaky made the time she come running in from the barn hollering that her special cat was in the bottom of the milk can drowned and where was everything? She wasn’t crying or carrying on, just hollering my cat got drowned where is everybody? She wouldn’t calm down till she’d gone all over the whole house and talked to everybody and seen everything. That was the same notion I got hearing that lost goose honking: that he wasn’t so much just asking where the lost flock was — he was wanting to know where the river was, and the bank, and everything hooked up with his life. Where is my world? he was wanting to know, and where the hell am I if I can’t locate it? He had lost his way and was out there flying the river, out of his head looking for it. He was trying to check around quick and get everything in its place, like Squeaky had needed to do when she’d lost her cat, and like me wanting to see them logs again. Only with me, I couldn’t figure what I thought I’d lost: no cats that I could think of, and I don’t know as I was missing a flock . . . or ever even had a way. But I still knew the feeling.

Maybe he couldn't understand why we weren't able to laugh yet, but he knew you can't really be strong until you see a funny side to things. In fact, he worked so hard at pointing out the funny side of things that I was wondering a little if maybe he was blind to the other side, if maybe he wasn't able to see what it was that parched laughter deep inside your stomach. Maybe the guys weren't able to see it either, just feel the pressures of the different beams and frequencies coming from all directions, working to push and bend you one way or another, feel the Combine at work - but I was able to see it.

But the rest are even scared to open up and laugh. You know, that's the first thing that got me about this place, that there wasn't anybody laughing. I haven't heard a real laugh since I came through that door, do you know that? Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.

I'm accustomed to being top man. I been a bull goose catskinner for every gyppo logging operation in the Northwest and bull goose gambler all the way from Korea, was even bull goose pea weeder on that pea farm at Pendleton — so I figure if I'm bound to be a loony, then I'm bound to be a stompdown dadgum good one.

Never before did I realize that mental illness could have the aspect of power, power. Think of it: perhaps the more insane a man is, the more powerful he could become. Hitler an example. Fair makes the old brain reel, doesn't it?

The fundamentalists have taken the fun out of the mental.

I have known a lot of people to go down and out — they kill themselves with alcohol or downers. But I've never known anybody to go up and out.

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.