110+ Ken Kesey Quotes On Education, Bus And One Flew

Ken Kesey was an American author who rose to fame in the 1960s. He is most well known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and his participation in the hippie movement. Kesey is also known for his work on the 1960s counterculture, psychedelic drug experimentation, and Merry Pranksters. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Ken Kesey on education, life, love.

Top 10 Ken Kesey Quotes

1. Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.
2. You don't lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case.
3. People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.
4. It is just as much an offense to take offense as it is to give offense.
5. When you love someone it is forever, or it was never really love at all.
6. There've been a lot more people hurt on astro-turf than grass.
7. I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound.
8. I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower. Oh yeah, well I'm so insane, I voted for Eisenhower TWICE!
9. I've enjoyed being a famous writer-except that every once in a while you have to write something.
10. The raw materials of reality without the glue of time are materials adrift and reality is as meaningless as the balsa parts of a model airplane scattered to the wind.

Ken Kesey Short Quotes

• You can't really be strong until you see a funny side to things.
• Plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom.
• If you're a Conservative, why aren't you behind conserving the land?
• The world news might not be therapeutic.
• But I tried, didn't I? Goddamnit, at least I did that.
• See with your ears and hear with your eyes.
• The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery.
• The '60s aren't over; they won't be over until the Fat Lady gets high.
• We think we’re in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.
• The Grateful Dead are faster than light drive.

Ken Kesey Quotes About Life

If this glorious birth to death hassle is the only hassle we are ever to have ..if our grand exhilarating fight of life is such a tragically short little scrap anyway,compared to the eons of rounds before and after-then why should one want to relinquish even a few precious seconds of it? — Ken Kesey

Living is the purpose of life, And meaning can be found therein. I finds thou. Thou becomes it. And it begins again. — Ken Kesey

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. — Ken Kesey

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

But if they don't exist, how can a man see them? — Ken Kesey

All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down. — Ken Kesey

They can't tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed. — Ken Kesey

Major part of the Southern California pop scene in the 60s "People think that love is an emotion. Love is good sense." — Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey Quotes About Bus

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

Now, you’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus. — Ken Kesey

There are going to be times when we can't wait for somebody. Now, you're either on the bus or off the bus. — Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey Quotes About One Flew

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. — Ken Kesey

High high in the hills , high in a pine tree bed. She's tracing the wind with that old hand, counting the clouds with that old chant, Three geese in a flock one flew east one flew west one flew over the cuckoo's nest — Ken Kesey

But it's the truth even if it didn't happen. — Ken Kesey

What do you think you are, for Chrissake, crazy or somethin'? Well you're not! You're not! You're no crazier than the average asshole out walkin' around on the streets and that's it. — Ken Kesey

This world… belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak. — Ken Kesey

That ain't me, that ain't my face. It wasn't even me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn't even really me them; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted. — Ken Kesey

But I remember 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 — Ken Kesey

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

What makes people so impatient is what I can't figure; all the guy had to do was wait. — Ken Kesey

But he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain. — Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey Quotes About Writing

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph. — Ken Kesey

I felt like you can write forever, but you have a short time to raise a family. And I think a family is a lot more important than writing. — Ken Kesey

To hell with facts! We need stories. — Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey Famous Quotes And Sayings

You can't blame the President for the state of the country, it's always the poets' fault. You can't expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don't have it in them. Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold. — Ken Kesey

To be just without being mad (and the madder you get the madder you get), to be peaceful without being stupid, to be interested without being compulsive, to be happy without being hysterical... smoke grass. — Ken Kesey

Marvelous wonders don't have to happen of a sudden, the way they do in the Arabian Nights. They can also take a long time, like crystals growing, or minds changing, or leaves turning. The trick is to keep an eye peeled, so they don't slip by unappreciated. — Ken Kesey

LSD lets you in on something. When you're tripping, the idea of race disappears; the idea of sex disappears; you don't even know what species you are sometimes. And I don't know of anybody who hasn't come back from that being more humane, more thoughtful, more understanding. — Ken Kesey

No, my friend. We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you? — Ken Kesey

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. — Ken Kesey

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. — Ken Kesey

There's no disgrace in failing, lad, Though friends and foes deride; In fact, a failure's not so bad As never having tried. — Ken Kesey

All that five thousand kids lived in those five thousand houses, owned by guys that got off the train. The houses looked so much alike that, time and time again, the kids went home by mistake to different houses and different families. Nobody ever noticed. — Ken Kesey

Then - as he was talking - a set of tail-lights going past lit up McMurphy's face, and the windshield reflected an expression that was allowed only because he figured it'd be too dark for anybody in the car to see, dreadfully tired and strained and frantic, like there wasn't enough time left for something he had to do. — Ken Kesey

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. — Ken Kesey

Alongside the statement about one man's poison being another man's high, one might as well add that one man's saint can be another man's sore and one man's hero can turn out to be that man's biggest hangup. — Ken Kesey

I sometimes have these spells of compulsive truth. But as Lady Macbeth would say, "The fit is momentary." — Ken Kesey

He's got hands so long and white and dainty I think they carved each other out of soap, and sometimes they get loose and glide around in front of him free as two white birds until he notices them and traps them between his knees; it bothers him that he's got pretty hands. — Ken Kesey

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

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

Like a cartoon world, where the figures are flat and outlined in black, jerking through some kind of goofy story that might be real funny if it weren't for the cartoon figures being real guys. — Ken Kesey

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. — Ken Kesey

The reverberation often exceeds through silence the sound that sets it off; the reaction occasionally outdoes by way of repose the event that stimulated it; and the past not uncommonly takes a while to happen, and some long time to figure out. — Ken Kesey

He was in his chair in the corner, resting a second before he came out for the next round -- in a long line of next rounds. The thing he was fighting, you couldn't whip it for good. All you could do was keep on whipping it, till you couldn't come out anymore and somebody else had to take your place. — Ken Kesey

For there is always a sanctuary more, a door that can never be forced, a last inviolable stronghold that can never be taken, whatever the attack; your vote can be taken, you name, you innards, or even your life, but that last stonghold can only be surrendered. And to surrender it for any reason other than love is to surrender love. — Ken Kesey

What we hoped was that we could stop the coming end of the world. — Ken Kesey

We'd just shared the last beer and slung the empty can out the window at a stop sign and were just waiting 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. — Ken Kesey

Memory whispers someplace in that jumbled machinery. — Ken Kesey

I been away a long time. — Ken Kesey

The job of the writer is to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful. — Ken Kesey

No, that nurse ain't some kinda monster chicken, buddy, what she is is a ball-cutter. I've seen a thousand of 'em, old and young, men and women. Seen 'em all over the country and in the homes- people who try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow their rules, to live like they want you to. And the best way to do this, to get you to knuckle under, is to weaken you by gettin' you where it hurts the worst. — Ken Kesey

I've found psychedelics to be keys to worlds that have always existed, that have to be talked about. — Ken Kesey

But, gee," the other nurse says, "what on earth would MAKE a man want to do something like disrupt the ward for, Miss Ratched? What possible motive...?""You seem to forget, MISS Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane. — Ken Kesey

Things you think you're saying for the first time ever, have been said better before by Shakespeare, though they may need saying again. — Ken Kesey

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

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. — Ken Kesey

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. — Ken Kesey

Always stay in your own movie. — Ken Kesey

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

He Who Marches Out Of Step Hears Another Drum — Ken Kesey

The Haight is just a place; the '60s was a spirit. — Ken Kesey

- he's finished with that; it's like an old clock that won't tell time but won't stop neither, with the hands bent out of shape and the face bare of numbers and the alarm bell rusted silent, an old worthless clock that just keeps ticking and cuckooing without meaning nothing. — Ken Kesey

Leary can get a part of my mind that's kind of rusted shut grinding again, just by being around him and talking. — Ken Kesey

Mr. Bibbit, you might warn this Mr. Harding that I'm so crazy I admit to voting for Eisenhower. Bibbit! You tell Mr. McMurphy I'm so crazy I voted for Eisenhower twice! And you tell Mr. Harding right back — he puts both hands on the table and leans down, his voice getting low — that I'm so crazy I plan to vote for Eisenhower again this November. — Ken Kesey

But if the strength ain't real, I recall thinking the very last thing that day, before I finally passed out, then the weakness sure enough is. Weakness is true and real. I used to accuse the kid of faking his weakness. But faking proves the weakness is real. Or you wouldn't be so weak as to fake it. No, you can't ever fake being weak. You can only fake being strong. . . — Ken Kesey

The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon — Ken Kesey

No one's ever dared come out and say it before, but there's not a man among us that doesn't think it, that doesn't feel just as you do about her and the whole business - feel it somewhere down deep in his scared little soul. — Ken Kesey

Of offering more than what I can deliver, I have a bad habit, it is true. But I have to offer more than I can deliver, To be able to deliver what I do. — Ken Kesey

Billy here has been talkin' about slicin' his wrists again, so is there seven of you guys who'd like to join him and make it therapeutic? — Ken Kesey

If grass were legalized, it would help our drug problem enormously. — Ken Kesey

What can you pay for the way a man lives? What can you pay for what a man is? — Ken Kesey

I've never seen crack or a lot of these new drugs. Don't know anything about them. I don't know what they do for you, or whether they do anything good for you or not. But I do still have a lot of faith in the spiritual purity of LSD and pot. — Ken Kesey

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. — Ken Kesey

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

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. He knows there's a painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girlfriend has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won't let the pain blot out the humor no more'n he'll let the humor blot out the pain. — Ken Kesey

Tricker the Squirrel is the best piece I ever wrote. It's intricate. — Ken Kesey

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. — Ken Kesey

Never before did I realize that mental illness could have the aspect of power, power. Think of it: perhaps the more insane a man is, the more powerful he could become. Hitler an example. Fair makes the old brain reel, doesn't it? — Ken Kesey

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

The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer. — Ken Kesey

Time overlaps itself. A breath breathed from a passing breeze is not the whole wind, neither is it just the last of what has passed and the first of what will come, but is more--let me see--more like a single point plucked on a single strand of a vast spider web of winds, setting the whole scene atingle. That way; it overlaps ... as prehistoric ferns grow from bathtub planters. — Ken Kesey

You can count how many seeds are in the apple, but not how many apples are in the seed. — Ken Kesey

There’s no doubt in my mind that McMurphy’s won, but I’m not sure what. — Ken Kesey

They did type me as a horror writer, but I have been able to do all sorts of things within that framework. — Ken Kesey

Ocean, Ocean I'll beat you in the end. — Ken Kesey

More was revealed in a human face than a human being can bear face to face. — Ken Kesey

The man who seeks revenge digs two graves. — Ken Kesey

Your trouble is, you keep trying to unscrew the unscrutable. — Ken Kesey

Nowhere else in history has there ever been a flag that stands for the right to burn itself. This is the fractal of our flag. It stands for the right to destroy itself. — Ken Kesey

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

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

Sometimes I looked at them and sometimes they looked at me, but rarely did we look at one another. — Ken Kesey

Since we don't know where we're going, we have to stick together in case someone gets there. — Ken Kesey

Life Lessons by Ken Kesey

1. Ken Kesey's work emphasizes the importance of staying true to oneself and embracing a life of adventure and exploration.
2. He encourages us to take risks and to be open to new experiences, as well as to consider the perspectives of others.
3. He also reminds us to be mindful of the power of our words and actions, and to strive to make a positive impact on the world.