Quotes by Ken Kesey

Though he'd come pretty close, he'd never come to the point of Sending Out yet. Oh, he'd prayed for things, but that's different - that ain't like Sending Out. You can pray for just about anything, but Sending Out for Divine Help!  - Well, it ain't ordering from Monkey Ward.

While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh out across the water-laughing at the girl, the guys, at George, at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain back at the pier and the bicycle rider and the service-station guys and the five thousand houses and the Big Nurse and all of it. Because he knows 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 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.

The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer -- they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.

People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.

You don't plow under the corn because the seed was planted with a neighbor's shovel.

"I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower." "Oh yeah, well I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower TWICE!"

A sound of cornered-animal fear and hate and surrender and defiance . . . like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn't care about anything but himself and his dying.

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.