Ken Kesey

“There's something about taking a plow and breaking new ground. It gives you energy.”

“You don't lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case.”

“He couldn't seem to get his teeth into anything. Except books. The things in books was darn near more real to him than the things breathing and eating.”

“The frontiers we broke into in the '60s are still largely unexplored.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When we first broke into that forbidden box in the other dimension, we knew we had discovered something as surprising and powerful as the New World when Columbus came stumbling onto it.”

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

“Ritual is necessary for us to know anything.”

“I was raised a Christian and was a stone-faced acid head.”

“People don't want other people to get high, because if you get high, you might see the falsity of the fabric of the society we live in.”

“Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.”

“When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I discovered at an early age that I was - shall we be kind and say different? It's a better, more general word than the other one... I got sick... 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.”

“. . .sometimes reading the same page over and over, until one sleepy afternoon something clicked, like a lock unlocking, and she saw those printed doors swing open on a vast house of words.”

“Tricker the Squirrel is the best piece I ever wrote. It's intricate.”

“Society is what decides who's sane and who isn't, so you got to measure up.”

“You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself”