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Ken Kesey Quotes
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I got high on psychedelics before I was ever drunk. I never smoked. Then LSD came by. And to me it was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened... And, of course, the best drugs ever were manufactured by the government.
Ken Kesey
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You're making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You're not crazy the way they think. Yes...I see...
Ken Kesey
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They can't tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.
Ken Kesey
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I been silent so long now it's gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please. 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.
Ken Kesey
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Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range... come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River...
Ken Kesey
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There's something about what we're doing, [which] is that we're meant to lose... every time! We make these foires, write these books and perform this music, but the big juggernaut of civilization continues and we've been kind of brushed to the side, but I think all through history there's been these kind of divine losers that just take a deep breath and go ahead—knowing that society's not going to understand it—and not even caring, because they're having a good time.
Ken Kesey
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I have known a lot of people to go down and out — they kill themselves with alcohol or downers. But I've never known anybody to go up and out.
Ken Kesey
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What we hoped was that we could stop the coming end of the world.
Ken Kesey
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She asked if we were calm enough for her to take off the cuffs, and McMurphy nodded. He had slumped over with his head hung and his elbows between his knees and looked completely exhausted—it hadn't occurred to me that it was just as hard for him to stand straight as it was for me.
Ken Kesey
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There are going to be times when we can't wait for somebody. Now, you're either on the bus or off the bus. If you're on the bus, and you get left behind, then you'll find it again. If you're off the bus in the first place — then it won't make a damn.
Ken Kesey
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The real crazies who are looking for a messiah... after an hour or so they realise I'm not it and go off and look somewhere else.
Ken Kesey
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But just as soon as we got to the pool he said he did wish something mighta been done, though, and dove into the water.
Ken Kesey
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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.
Ken Kesey
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He gave a cry. At the last, falling backward, his face appearing to us for a second upside down before he was smothered on the floor by a pile of white uniforms, he let himself cry out: A sound of cornered-animal fear and hate and surrender and defiance, that if you ever trailed coon or cougar or lynx is like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn't care any more about anything but himself and his dying.
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I watched and tried to figure out what he would have done. I was only sure of one thing: he wouldn't have left something like that sit there in the day room with his name tacked on it for twenty or thirty years so the Big Nurse could use it as an example of what can happen if you buck the system. I was sure of that.
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What makes people so impatient is what I can't figure; all the guy had to do was wait.
Ken Kesey
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It isn't by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.
Ken Kesey
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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.
Ken Kesey
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I lay in bed the night before the fishing trip and thought it over, about my being deaf, about the years of not letting on I heard what was said, and I wonder if I can ever act any other way again. But I remembered one thing: it wasn't me that started acting deaf; it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.
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I like that saying of Thoreau's that in wildness is the preservation of the world. Settlers on this continent from the beginning have been seeking that wilderness and its wildness. The explorers and pioneers were out on the edge, seeking that wildness because they could sense that in Europe everything had become locked tight with things. The things were owned by all the same people and all of the roads went in the same direction forever. When we got here there was a sense of possibility and new direction, and it had to do with wildness.
Ken Kesey
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Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
Ken Kesey
Born:
September 17, 1935
Died:
November 10, 2001
(aged 66)
Bio:
Kenneth Elton "Ken" Kesey was an American novelist, essayist, and countercultural figure. He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.
Known for:
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)
Sometimes a Great Notion (1964)
Sailor Song (1992)
Demon Box (1986)
Last Go Round (1994)
Most used words:
people
real
time
face
mind
answer
big
man
sound
crazy
mystery
bus
lose
hands
laugh
Ken Kesey on Wikipedia
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