Sept. 17, 1935 – Nov.10, 2001
photo by Larry Keenan
“To hell with facts! We need stories!”
“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.”
“I’ve enjoyed being a famous writer, except that every once in a while you have to write something.”
“Shakespeare wasn’t writing for stuff to lie on the page. It was supposed to get up and move around.”
“What we hoped was that we could stop the coming end of the world.”
“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.”
“But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.”
“They can’t tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.”
“He Who Marches Out Of Step Hears Another Drum”
“Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
“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, Kesey’s Garage Sale
“I get weary of people who use pessimism to avoid being responsible for all the problems in our culture. A man who says ‘we’re on the road to disaster’ is seldom trying to wrench the wheel away from the driver. I prefer the troublemaker.”
courtesy of Rolling Stone Magazine
photo by Larry Keenan
Photo by Paul Fusco, 1976
“It was at Stanford, when Kesey was a student, that the crucial events for the creation of his most famous book had played out. Namely, Perry Lane, a neighbor of Kesey, and Vik Lovel, another graduate student of the psychology department, invited Kesey over to participate in a much secretive program known as the Project MKUltra. If it wasn’t for Kesey’s volunteering engagement to this program, probably the chain of events would have turned out much differently, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest would have never seen the light of the day.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merry_Pranksters
http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/keenan/
“But I tried, didn’t I? Goddamnit, at least I did that.”
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