Ken Kesey Quotes

Because sometimes the only way to keep from losing everything is to give everything up. Because sometimes strength must for the sake of winning give in to —

He’s like an old clock the won’t tell time but won’t stop neither with the hands bend out of shape and the face bare of numbers and the alarm rusted silent, an old worthless clock that keeps ticking and cuckooing without meaning nothing.

The sun was prying up the clouds and lighting the brick front of the hospital rose red. A thin breeze worked at sawing what leaves were left from the oak trees, stacking them neatly agains the wire cyclone fence. There were little brown birds occasionally on the fence: when a puff of leaves would hit the fence the birds would fly off with the wind. It looked at first like the leaves were hitting the fence and turning into birds and flying away.

But the new guy is different, and the Acutes can see it, different from anybody been coming on this ward for the past ten years, different from anybody they ever met outside. He's just as vulnerable, maybe, but the Combine didn't get him.

She walked right on past, ignoring him just like she chose to ignore the way nature had tagged her with those outsized badges of femininity, just like she was above him, and sex, and everything else that’s weak and of the flesh.

Reality is greater than the sum of its parts, also a damn sight holier.

One of the reasons for his drinking, Henry said, was John's mama used to make the whole family get down on their knees and pray like fury everytime John's daddy — Henry's first cousin, I believe — would come home boozed, and John never quite got it straight that they weren't thanking the good Lord for his blessing same as they did at the supper table. So according to Henry booze come to be sort of holy to him and with faith like that John grew up religious as a deacon.

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.

. . .sometimes reading the same page over and over, until one sleepy afternoon something clicked, like a lock unlocking, and she saw those printed doors swing open on a vast house of words.

Which is just another way of blaming, and perhaps the best way, because there is solace and a certain stoical peace in blaming everything on the rain, and then blaming something as uncontrollable as the rain on something as indifferent as the Arm of the Lord.

Because nothing can be done about the rain except blaming. And if nothing can be done about it, why get yourself in a sweat about it?

"Cafe Owners are more frustrated than the common laborer," Draeger writes. "The common laborer answers only to the foreman; the cafe owner answers to every patron who stops in"

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.

He's what he is, that's it. Maybe that makes him strong enough, being what he is.

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.

You might hide in some Freudian jungle most of your miserable life, baying at the moon and shouting curses at God, but at the end, right down there at the damned end when it counts... you would sure as anything clear up just enough to realize the moon you have spent so many years baying at is nothing but the light globe up there on the ceiling, and God is just something placed in your bureau drawer by the Gideon Society. Yes, I sighed again, in the long run insanity would be the same old coldhearted drag of too solid flesh, too many slings and arrows, and too much outrageous fortune.