NEVER GIVE A INCH!

The past is funny ... it never seems to let things lie, finished. It never seems to stay in place as it should.

Truth doesn't run on time like a commuter train.

We had ideas about relationships. We both agreed that each pair of people must have a mutually compatible system all their own within which they can communicate, or communication falls like the Tower of Babel. A man should be able to expect his wife to play the role of Wife--be she bitchy or dutiful--when she relates to him. For her lover she may have a completely different role, but at home, on the Husband-Wife set, she must stay within the confines of that part. Or we would all wander around never knowing our friends from our strangers.

There are some things that can't be the truth even if they did happen.

Anesthetized time; nothing moves and everything is at once.

The dead's dead ... get 'em in the ground and look to the live ones.

The raw materials of reality without the glue of time are materials adrift and reality is as meaningless as the balsa parts of a model airplane scattered to the wind.

I sometimes have these spells of compulsive truth. But as Lady Macbeth would say, "The fit is momentary."

Men are forever eager to press drink upon those they consider their superiors, hoping thereby to eliminate that distinction between them.... And women, when confronted by superiors, substitute for drink the crippling liquor of their sex.

We made love. How pedestrian the words look--trite, worn, practically featureless with use--but how can one better describe that which happens when it happens? that creation? that magic blending? I might say we became figures in a mesmerized dance before the rocking talisman of the moon, starting slow, so slow ... a pair of feathers drifting through clear liquid substance of sky ... gradually accelerating, faster and faster and finally into photon existence of pure light ... as my whole straining body burst like fluid electricity into hers.

Man is certain of nothing but his ability to fail.

There is nothing like a sense of difference for getting a man lined up, shoulder to shoulder, with everybody as different as he is, in a dedicated campaign for the Common Good; which means a campaign either for the ramming of that difference down the throat of an ignorant and underprivileged and unholy world--this is only true, of course, in the case of a bona fide holy difference--or, at the other extreme, a campaign for the stamping out of the thing that caused the damned difference in the first place.

The man who seeks revenge digs two graves.

At one time people conveniently "went mad" and were never heard from again. Like a character in a romantic novel. But now ... 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.

There's shames a man can never reason away, though he looks back and piles up reasons over them forty dozen deep. And maybe those are the shames a man never should reason away.

A man has to know he had a choice before he can enjoy what he chose.

Alongside the statement about one man's poison being another man's high, one might as well add that one man's saint can be another man's sore and one man's hero can turn out to be that man's biggest hangup.

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.

The hardest man ... is but a shell.

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

We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

KEN KESEY, attributed, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

I'm for mystery, not interpretive answers.... The answer is never the answer.

KEN KESEY, "The Art of Fiction", The Paris Review, spring 1994

The reverberation often exceeds through silence the sound that sets it off; the reaction occasionally outdoes by way of repose the event that stimulated it; and the past not uncommonly takes a while to happen, and some long time to figure out.