Tao Te Ching
Ken Kesey
1935 – 2001 CE
Countercultural icon, Beat to Hippie era link, Grateful Dead mentor, and founder of the Merry Pranksters; Ken Kesey wrote one of the most influential books of the 20th century, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His life blended with his fiction and became a dramatic and entertaining story in itself as he explored the world of consciousness with the Merry Pranksters, evaded police trying to arrest him for marijuana possession, faked a suicide, went to jail, and finally settled down into a back-to-the-land lifestyle. A continual voice of authentic clarity; his essays, articles, and books brought insight and wisdom to the many cultural inequalities, dilemmas, and challenges of his time.
Lineages
American (USA) Artists Trickster
Eras
Generations
Post War Generation (1928 – 1945 CE)Unlisted Sources
Paris Review (1994)
Quotes by Ken Kesey (11 quotes)
“People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.”
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“when you lose your laugh you lose your footing”
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“If you're a Conservative, why aren't you behind conserving the land?”
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“The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer. I've never seen anybody really find the answer, but 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.”
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“I'm for mystery, not interpretive answers. … 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.”
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“All through history there's been these kind of divine losers that just take a deep breath and go ahead—knowing that society's not going to understand it—and not even caring, because they're having a good time.”
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“Leary can get a part of my mind that's kind of rusted shut grinding again... we had discovered something as surprising and powerful as the New World when Columbus came stumbling onto it. People like Leary have done the best they can to chart it sort of underground, but the government and the powers do not want this world charted, because it threatens established powers. It always has.”
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“If you could weigh a book, I don’t know any book that would be more full. It’s more full than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. It has Saint Elmo’s fire, and great whales, and grand arguments between heroes, and secret passions. It risks wandering far, far out into the globe.”
from Paris Review (1994)
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“Nobody had more class than Melville... [he] took on the whole world, saw it all in a vision, and risked everything in prose that sings. You have a sense from the very beginning that Melville had a vision in his mind of what this book was going to look like, and he trusted himself to follow it through all the way.”
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