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“there was nothing, not a thing! about the country that made a man feel Big And Important. If anything it made a man feel dwarfed, and about as important as one of the fish-Indians living down on the clamflats. Important? Why, there was something about the whole blessed country that made a soul feel whipped before he got started.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“A Man Is Known By The Mice He Keeps”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Alarm, when used for anything less than a fire or an air attack, is certain to muddle the mind, unsettle the senses, and, in most cases, more than double the danger.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Oregon October, when the fields of timothy and rye-grass stubble are being burned, the sky itself catches fire. Flocks of wrens rush up from the red alder thickets like sparks kicked from a campfire, the salmon jumps again, and the river rolls molten and slow . . . Down river, from Andy’s Landing, a burned-off cedar snag held the sun spitted like an apple, hissing and dripping juices against a grill of Indian Summer clouds. All the hillside, all the drying Himalaya vine that lined the big river, and the sugar-maple trees farther up, burned a dark brick and over-lit red. The river split for the jump of a red-gilled silver salmon, then circled to mark the spot where it fell. Spoonbills shoveled at the crimson mud in the shallows, and dowitchers jumped from cattail to cattail, frantically crying “Kleek! Kleek!�� as though the thin reeds were as hot as the pokers they resembled. Canvasback and brant flew south in small, fiery, faraway flocks. And in the shabby ruin of broken cornfields rooster ringnecks clashed together in battle so bright, so gleaming polished-copper bright, that the fields seemed to ring with their fighting. This is Hank’s bell.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“As the curtain closed, as the echoes stood up to leave: He wouldn’t of done it for any other reason—he didn’t want to have anybody to have to take the risk just for—I guess not, old fellow, because there wasn’t anybody but him left—He did it because—I guess not—because everybody left and he knows he can’t run them logs down by himself—He did it because . . . he finally saw how it was . . . because . . . he finally saw that there wasn’t any sense. Because of rust, of rot. Of push, of squeeze. Because there is really no strength beyond the strength of those around you. Because of weakness. Because of no grit, no grit anywhere at all and labor availeth not. Because all is vanity and vexation of the spirit. Because of that drum on the donkey forever breaking down. Of bruises from springbacks. Of sinus headaches and ingrown toenails. Of rain and the seas are still not full. Because of everything coming so thick and so fast for so long for so very long for finally too long. . .”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“she followed their expert lead and laughed along—they knew the secret of black, that it could not be made blacker, and if neither could it be made lighter, it could still be made funnier.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“To know a thing you have to trust what you know, and all that you know, and as far as you know in whatever direction your knowing drags you.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Reality is greater than the sum of its parts, also a damn sight holier. And the lives of such stuff as dreams are made of may be rounded with a sleep but they are not tied neatly with a red bow. Truth doesn’t run on time like a commuter train, though time may run on truth. And the Scenes Gone By and the Scenes to Come flow blending together in the sea-green deep while Now spreads in circles on the surface.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“He had only smiled, condescendingly and therapeutically. "No, Leland, not you. You, and in fact quite a lot of your generation, have in some way been exiled from that particular sanctuary. It's become almost impossible for you to 'go mad' in the classical sense. At one time people conveniently 'went mad' and were never heard from again. Like a character in a romantic novel. But now"--And I think he even went so far as to yawn--"you are too hip to yourself on a psychological level. You are all too intimate with too many of the symptoms of insanity to be caught completely off your guard. Another thing: all of you have a talent for releasing frustration through clever fantasy. And you, you are the worst of the lot on that score. So... you may be neurotic as hell for the rest of your life, and miserable, maybe even do a short hitch at Bellvue and certainly good for another five years as a paying patient--but I'm afraid never completely out." He leaned back in his elegant Lounge-o-Chair. "Sorry to disappoint you but the best I can offer is plain old schizophrenia with delusional tendencies.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“And like: “Why should one want to wake up dead anyway?�� If the glorious birth-to-death hassle is the only hassle we are ever to have . . . if our grand and 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, Sometimes a Great Notion

“When this is all over, I told myself, you will hate yourself for wasting so much time . .”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“He had only smiled, condescendingly and therapeutically. “No, Leland, not you. You, and in fact quite a lot of your generation, have in some way been exiled from that particular sanctuary. It’s become almost impossible for you to ‘go mad�� in the classical sense. At one time people conveniently ‘went mad�� and were never heard from again. Like a character in a romantic novel. But now”—And I think he even went so far as to yawn—“you are too hip to yourself on a psychological level. You all are too intimate with too many of the symptoms of insanity to be caught completely off your guard.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“He wants something from me. He doesn’t know that the only thing I have left is the hollow of something gone”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Which is just another way of blaming, and perhaps the best way, because there is solace and a certain stoical peace in blaming everything on the rain, and then blaming something as uncontrollable as the rain on something as indifferent as the Arm of the Lord.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“And the forest at night might be beautiful, but if it was dark how was a man to know that?”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“And crying doesn’t always mean need”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“He’d traveled in a straight line and completed a circle.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“All right. Then this is the whole shebang, boys, right here underfoot. Give up and admit it.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Besides there are somethings that can't be the truth even if they did happen.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“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. As a shiny new ax, taking a swing at somebody’s next year’s split-level pinewood pad, bites all the way to the Civil War. As proposed highways break down through the stacked strata of centuries.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“It means this is the only way we ever see ourselves; looking out, at others, reflected through cobwebs from an attic window . . .”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Am I this? Are these mine? These people? These insane people?”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“I was beginning to care for them. And as that cancerous emotion swelled within my heart so did my poor heart’s fear. Swollen heart. This is an insidious malady chiefly common in that mythical organ that pumps life through the veins of the ego: care, coronary care, complicated by galloping fear. The go-away-closer disease. Starving for contact and calling it poison when it is offered. We learn young to be leery of contact: Never open up, we learn . . . you want somebody running their dirty old fingers over your soul’s privates? Never accept candy from strangers. Or from friends. Sneak off a sack of gumdrops when nobody’s looking if you can, but don’t accept, never accept . . . You want somebody taking advantage? And above all, never care, never never never care. Because it is caring that lulls you into letting down your guard and leaving up your shades . . . you want some fink knowing what you are really like down inside?”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Now I don’t know what I love any more. I don’t know where the thing I make-pretend leaves off and the thing that’s really there starts up.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“And we are all surrounded by that skin, and he’s trying to show us some beauty in this condition.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“We almost made it that time. A little courage on someone’s part and we might have made it. We were swollen and ripe for an instant together, ready for picking, offering our store to each other’s hesitant fingers . . . a little tender courage at that rare right instant, and things might well have turned out differently. . .”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“To know a thing you have to trust what you know, and all that you know, and as far as you know in whatever direction your knowing drags you. I once had a pet pine squirrel named Omar who lived in the cotton secret”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“making it more than what it is lessens it. Just to see it clear is plenty.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“You can make a mark across the night with the tip of an embered stick, and you can actually see it fixed in its finity. You can be absolutely certain of its treacherous impermanence.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Man will do away with anything that threatens him with loneliness—even himself.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion