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

“I knew even before we got it rolling that this here was the type asshole that subscribed to magazines like the Nation and Atlantic and probably even read them, and that I didn't stand a snowball's chance against him in an argument; but I was too oiled too keep my mouth shut.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“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? And—thirdly—like: “If it’s such a goddamned hassle—why fight it?”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“He was struck by the order, dullness, dumbness, suicidal tendencies, and pointlessness of midcentury America, the America of the empire, the America that was going to put its stamp on a century, the America with its arteries clogged with things, and its soul left at some pawn shop along the way in order to raise the cash for guns.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Where is my world? he was wanting to know, and where the hell am I if I can’t locate it?”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“The lowest of villains will push man to greater heights than the tallest of heroes.”
― 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

“...we are all of us, dear boy ... trapped by our own existence.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Nobody, man," he says sadly, "can go home again.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Certain facts were apparent: dark; cold; thundering boots; quilts; pillow; light under the door—the materials of reality—but I could not pin these materials down in time. And the raw materials of reality without that 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, Sometimes a Great Notion

“What is there about our generation, man, that makes us sweat this root scene so much? Look at us. We wander across America in dedicated droves. Equipped with sideburns, sandals, and a steel string guitar. Relentlessly tracking our lost root beds. Yet all the while guarding against that most ignoble of ends, becoming root bound. What, pray, is it we hope to do with the object of our search if we succeed? If we have no intention of attaching ourselves to these roots. What use do you suppose we have in mind? Boil us up a tea and use them like sassafras as a purgative? Stash them away in our cedar chest with our high school diploma and prom programs? It's always been a mystery to me.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“One of the reasons for his drinking, Henry said, was Jon's momma used to make the whole family get down on their knees and pray like fury every time Jon's daddy would come home boozed. Jon never quite got it straight that they weren't thanking the good Lord for his blessing, same as they did at the supper table. So according to Henry, booze come to be something holy to him and with faith like that Jon grew up religious as a deacon.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“You and in fact quite a lot of your generation have in some way been exiled from that particular sanctuary its become almost impossible for you to go mad in the classical sense... You all are 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 few years at Bell View and certainly good for another 5 years as a paying patient but I'm afraid never completely out. Sorry to disappoint you but the best I can offer you is plain ole schizophrenia with delusional tendencies.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“The rain had let up and leveled out to its usual winter-long pace . . . not so much a rain as a dreamy smear of blue-gray that wipes over the land instead of falling on it, making patient spectral shades of the tree trunks and a pathic, placid, and cordial sighing sound all along the broad river. A friendly sound, even. It was nothing fearful after all. The same old rain, and, if not welcomed, at least accepted—an old gray aunt who came to visit every winter and stayed till spring. You learn to live with her.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“an old gray aunt who came to visit every winter and stayed till spring. You learn to live with her.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Boy, if you ain't a case: waiting someday to be a something to a Somebody you don't even know, yet.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“And sometimes, as you sing, you cannot help feeling that the unheard echoes and tunes forgotten are echoes of other voices and tunes of other singers...in that kind of world.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Our thermosed lives are, at best nine-tenths of the time padded by vacuum and sealed by silvered silicon, but, for all their artificiality, we are generally able to find means for unstoppering them now and then, and enjoy at least some portion of addlepated freedom.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“In the fall when they burn the stubble off the fields the sun gets this dusty hazy color, and the mare’s-tail clouds whipping along near Wakonda Head look like goldenrod bent over by the wind. It’s always real pretty. You can almost hear it ring in the sky.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“But even then, with her prize in tow as she weaves out of the bar, the shield never changes, the expression stays, still somewhere between blunt ferocity and brute pathos.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“He raced the motor, urging the car to decide which way to turn onto the street. “Come on, man . . . be serious.�� Gearshift hot as a poker, and ears ringing . . . finally, palm to face to somehow press away the ringing—I seemed to feel a tendoned hand playfully squeezing my knee, and a bagpipe’s whirling skirl wheezing in my throat—and discovers that he is weeping again; squeezing, wheezing and rattling the scene . . . and it is then—“Or if you can’t be serious,�� I scolded, “at least be rational; who could possibly in this wasted world . . . ?”—that he remembers the postcard lying on the porch.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“I love them but I cannot give myself for them.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“For there is always a sanctuary more, a door that can never be forced, whatever the force, a last inviolable stronghold that can never be taken, whatever the attack; your vote can be taken, your name, your innards, even your life, but that last stronghold can only be surrendered. And to surrender it for any reason other than love is to surrender love. Hank had always known this without knowing it, and by making him doubt it briefly I made it possible for both of us to discover it. I knew it now. And I knew that to win my love, my life, I would have to win back for myself the right to this last stronghold.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“She was saying something but I didn’t hear, I ran, leaving her behind, toward my brother . . . leaving her and blindly hoping she might see that I was making it possible to perhaps someday have her. Her or someone.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“(I figured, There’s no sense doing anything when everything’s already been done”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“And becomes aware of her image once more, vaguely reflected in the dirty attic window: what does it mean, all this concern about our images? 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

“I sighed, surrendering speech, but held on to her arm. “Viv . . . ?�� If this was the last of it, I wanted the last look of good-by.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“This kept happening, off and on. It’d be bright for a little bit, everything shining like chrome, waxy-looking, polished, then go dark as muddy water.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“And consummated there a month of quick looks, guarded smiles, accidental brushings of body too open or too secret to be mere accident, and all the other little unfinished vignettes of desire . . . and, perhaps most of all, consummated the shared knowledge of that desire,”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Sometimes—after futile all-nights—deserts fill my work-house and smoking sand gets in my eyes . . . and I must split the swollen cabin to check the dawn, to find: the creek still parties with the moon . . . the thrusting pine and whippoorwills still celebrate the sun. It generally works, and things are cool, but sometimes—after cutting out—nothing out there happens but the night. And those days were best forgotten.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion