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”

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

“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.”

“The trouble with super heroes is what to do between phone booths.”

“To hell with facts! We need stories!”

“You can't really be strong until you can see a funny side to things.”

“There's a lot of people who don't understand the circle crops in England. Pure enigma.”

“The Haight is just a place; the '60s was a spirit.”

“I don't think you fully understand the public, my friend; in this country, when something is out of order, then the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way.”

“When you're around the whole Dead scene, they're there as a tribal thing; they're there as part of a rendezvous and a pow-wow.”

“I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.”

“Loved. You can't use it in the past tense. Death does not stop that love at all.”

“He's the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people.”

“...I think apparatus burned out all over the ward trying to adjust to her come busting in like she did-took electronic readings on her and calculated they weren't built to handle something like this on the ward, and just burned out, like machines committing suicide.”

“They can't tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.”

“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.”

“I don't think I can give you an answer. Oh, I could give you Freudian reasons with fancy talk, and that would be right as far as it went. But what you want are the reasons for the reasons, and I'm not able to give you those. Not for the others, anyway. For myself? Guilt. Shame. Fear. Self-belittlement. I discovered at an early age that I was-- shall we be kind and say different? It's a better, more general world than the other one. 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.”

“If grass were legalized, it would help our drug problem enormously.”

“I'm accustomed to being top man. I been a bull goose catskinner for every gyppo logging operation in the Northwest and bull goose gambler all the way from Korea, was even bull goose pea weeder on that pea farm at Pendleton -- so I figure if I'm bound to be a loony, then I'm bound to be a stompdown dadgum good one.”

“The truth doesn't have to do with cruelty, the truth has to do with mercy.”