Ken Kesey Quotes

Since he is of no use anymore, there is no gain if he lives and no loss if he dies.

Useless as a pulled tooth.

And what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney rising our of a grassy and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit to every wayfarer--apples that are bitter-sweet with the moral of times vicissitude.

The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.

The man is as useless as nipples on a breastplate.

A recent conversation: Dubya: Look at the clock, time is racing! Cheney: That's the second hand, George.

Time touches all things with a destroying hand.

What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?

Nothing more than nothing can be said.

Eternity: what a waste of time.

How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.

Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

The dread of futility has been my life-long plague.

[History is] that terrible mill in which sawdust rejoins sawdust.

Of dead kingdoms I recall the soul, sitting amid their ruins

Careers are here and they're gone. No matter how great we think we are, we're nothing but the temples of Ozymandias-we're ruins in the making.

A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless.

There's a fascination frantic in a ruin that's romantic.

And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love...And you can never touch a girl in the same way more than once, twice, or another number of times however much you may wish to hold, wrap, or otherwise fix her hand, or look, or some other quality, or incident, known to you previously.

Futility is the defining characteristic of life.

What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.

Britain is not the same anymore of course. It's never the same.

I was astonished to find that the positions my grandfather had defended were now overgrown and entangled with trees and thorns. I suppose I had developed a sense of reverence for the locations he described in his memoirs and letters - the forts and the high emplacements. I had expected them to have been preserved in some way.

I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind -- by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.