Quotes from Ken Kesey

I don't seem able to get it straight in my mind....

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.

I could now (possibly) go back and restretch those shrunken hours, flake the images separate, arrange them in accurate chronological order, (possibly; with will-power, patience, and the proper chemicals) but being accurate is not necessarily being honest.... Nor is chronological reporting by any means always the most truthful (each camera has its own veracity) especially when, in all good faith, one cannot truthfully claim to remember what happened accurately....

Okay, stand outa the way. Sometimes when I go to exertin' myself I use up all the air nearby and grown men faint from suffocation. Stand back. There's liable to be crackin' cement and flying steel. Get the women and kids someplace safe. Stand back. . . .

The game goes round and round, to the rattle of dice and the shuffle of play money.

The way I remember it the tribe got paid some huge amount. That's what they said to him. He said, What can you pay for the way a man lives? He said, What can you pay for the way a man is? They didn't understand.

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.

Juicy fruit

Does the Spearmint lose its flavor on the bedpost over night?

turns me on so loud it's like no sound, everybody yelling at me hands over their ears from behind a glass wall, faces working around in talk circles but no sound from the mouths. my sound soaks up all other sound.

He had come to life for maybe a minute to try to tell us something, something none of us cared to listen to or tried to understand, and the effort had drained him dry.

Ting. Tingle, tingle, tremble toes, She's a good fisherman, catches hens, puts 'em inna pens Wire blier, limber lock, three geese inna flock One flew east, one flew west One flew over the cuckoo's nest O-U-T- spells out… goose swoops down and plucks you out.

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.

Does one ever play Coltrane for the uninitiated without subconsciously hoping for the worst?

He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy

I'd give something to see that. Mostly, I'd just to look over the country around the gorge again, just to bring some of it clear in my mind again. I been away a long time.

McMurphy tied a chunk of meat to each end of a four-foot string, tossed it into the air, and sent two squawking birds wheeling off, Till death do them part.

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.

Papa says if you don't watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite.

We] were just leaning back to get the feel of the day, swimming in that kind of tasty drowsiness that comes over you after a day of going hard at something you enjoy doing--half sunburned and half drunk and keeping awake only because you wanted to savor the taste as long as you could.

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.

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

He's safe as long as he can laugh, he thinks, and it works pretty fair.

I will be a sonofabitch if he ain't in here at eleven-thirty at night, fartin' around in the dark with a pair of scissors and a paper sack.