Ken Kesey Quotes

It’s fall coming, I thought, I can smell that sour-molasses smell of silage, clanging the air like a bell – smell like somebody’s been burning oak leaves, left them to smolder overnight because they’re too green.

A man has to know he had a choice before he can enjoy what he chose. I know now. That a human has to make it with other humans . . . before he can make it with himself.

there was nothing, not a thing! about the country that made a man feel Big And Important. If anything it made a man feel dwarfed, and about as important as one of the fish-Indians living down on the clamflats. Important? Why, there was something about the whole blessed country that made a soul feel whipped before he got started.

They're out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.

Rules? PISS ON YOUR FUCKING RULES!

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

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.

One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo's nest.

I can’t help it. I was born a miscarriage. I had so many insults I died. I was born dead. I can’t help it. I’m tired. I’m give out trying. You got chances. I had so many insults I was born dead. You got it easy. I was born dead an’ life was hard. I’m tired. I’m tired out talking and standing up. I been dead fifty-five years.” The

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.

To hell with that. A man goin' fishing with two whores from Portland don't have to take that crap.

I don't think I can give you an answer. Oh, I could give you Freudian reasons with fancy talk, and that would be right as far as it went. But what you want are the reasons for the reasons, and I'm not able to give you those. Not for the others, anyway. For myself? Guilt. Shame. Fear. Self-belittlement. I discovered at an early age that I was — shall we be kind and say different? It's a better, more general world than the other one. I indulged in certain practices that our society regards as shameful. And I got sick. It wasn't the practices, I don't think, it was the feeling that the great, deadly, pointing forefinger of society was pointing at me — and the great voice of millions chanting, 'Shame. Shame. Shame.' It's society's way of dealing with someone different.

You think I wuh-wuh-wuh-want to stay in here? You think I wouldn't like a con-con-vertible and a guh-guh-girl friend? But did you ever have people l-l-laughing at you? No, because you're so b-big and so tough! Well, I'm not big and tough.

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.

Later, hiding in the latrine from the black boys, I'd take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.