Quotes from Ken Kesey

All right. Then this is the whole shebang, boys, right here underfoot. Give up and admit it.

And the forest at night might be beautiful, but if it was dark how was a man to know that?

It's like each face was a sign like one of those "I'm Blind" signs the dago accordion players in Portland hung around their necks, only these signs say "I'm tired" or "I'm scared" or "I'm dying of a bum liver" or "I'm all bound up with machinery and people pushing me alla time." I can read all the signs, it don't make any difference how little the print gets.

Maybe he couldn't understand why we weren't able to laugh yet, but he knew you can't really be strong until you can see a funny side to things.

And the more I think about how nothing can be helped, the faster the fog rolls in.

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.

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 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.

When a man showed up you didn't want to look at his face and he didn't want to look at yours, because it's painful to see somebody so clear that it's like looking inside him, but then neither did you want to look away and lose him completely. You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, as painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself.

Randle McMurphy) Never before did I realize that mental illness could have the aspect of power, power.

Besides, there are some things that can't be the truth even if they did happen.

The secret of being a top-notch con man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make him think he's getting it. I

Now I don't know what I love any more. I don't know where the thing I make-pretend leaves off and the thing that's really there starts up.

Néha el is felejtem, milyen csodákat tud tenni a nevetés.

making it more than what it is lessens it. Just to see it clear is plenty.

Thursday," McMurphy says again. "Looooo," yells that guy upstairs. "That's

I noticed vaguely that I was getting so's I could see some good in the life around me.

And we are all surrounded by that skin, and he's trying to show us some beauty in this condition.

It means this is the only way we ever see ourselves; looking out, at others, reflected through cobwebs from an attic window . . .

I've thought of everything, know what I mean?

To know a thing you have to trust what you know, and all that you know, and as far as you know in whatever direction your knowing drags you. I once had a pet pine squirrel named Omar who lived in the cotton secret

One side of the room younger patients, known as Acutes because the doctors figure them still sick enough to be fixed

You got to understand that as soon as a man goes to help someone, he leaves himself wide open.

Meg kell neked is érteni, hogy amint valaki a másiknak a segítségére siet, maga fedezetlen marad.