Quotes from Ken Kesey

Listen, wait, and be patient. Every shaman knows you have to deal with the fire that's in your audience's eye.

You've got to get out and pray to the sky to appreciate the sunshine; otherwise you're just a lizard standing there with the sun shining on you.

When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.

When we first broke into that forbidden box in the other dimension, we knew we had discovered something as surprising and powerful as the New World when Columbus came stumbling onto it.

It is bad to suppress laughter. It goes back down to your hips. Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.

I believe that a man should be... as big as he feels it in him to be!

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

If you've got love in your heart, whatever you do from that moment out is likely to be right. If you've got that one true note ringing inside you, then whatever you do is going to be OK.

You don't lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

The Grateful Dead are our religion. This is a religion that doesn't pay homage to the God that all the other religions pay homage to.

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

Always stay in your own movie.

Take what you can use and let the rest go by.

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.

I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound.

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.

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

He's the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people.

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.

I had to keep on acting deaf if i wanted to hear at all.

But at least I tried

He who walks out of step hears another drum.