Sometimes a Great Notion Quotes

“And I lay awake for hours, hoping another phone call would give me that opportunity to be alone and unruffled with her.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Is it that?” she asked in a soft voice, once more examining her hands, “not being sure of that ‘someday’? Or is it not being sure of having that ‘somebody’?”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“What? Oh, I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to come on so jaded. What scene? This one, the rain, those geese up there with their hard-luck stories . . . this, this same world. They all tried to do something with it. Dante did his best to build himself a hell because a hell presuppose a heaven. Baudelaire scarfed hashish and looked inside. Nothing there. Nothing but dreams and delusion. They all were driven by the need for something else. But when the drive was over, and the dreaming and the deluding worn out, they all ended up with the same dull old scene. But, look, you see, Viv, they had an advantage with their scene, they had something we’ve lost . . .” I waited for her to ask what that something was, but she only sat silently, her hands folded on the black overcoat. “. . . They had a limitless supply of tomorrows to work with. If you didn’t make your dream today, well, there was always more days coming, more dreams full of more sound and fury and future: what if today was a hassle? There was always tomorrow to find the River Jordan, or Valhalla, or that special providence in the fall of a sparrow . . . we could believe in the Great Gettin’-up Morning coming someday because if it didn’t make it today there was always tomorrow.” “And there isn’t any more?” I looked up at her and grinned. “What do you think?”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“jokes about anything are now and then bound to cut too close to the truth.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“I take my stand behind the human heart, not alongside violence . . .” ... Not be right or wrong or good or bad, just be pulling. In a minute the idiots won’t even be listening, they’ll just be pulling. They don’t have to think. Just be afraid naturally and pulling together. Like specks of mercury rolling into the big piece. Like little specks of mercury rolling into bigger specks and then bigger and then just one piece, and nothing to be scared about or hurt about because you’re just a piece of a bigger piece getting bigger rolling across the land into an ocean of mercury . . .”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“I understand perfectly; it’s like the madman who goes over Niagara Falls in a coffee can because that’s as good a way as any to get dead.” “That’s right,” I tell him, knowing he don’t understand it at all—that it’s more because it’s as good a way as any to stay alive. . . .”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Little of God, then a little of ghosts, is that it, bub?” as though our unfortunate argument were forgotten. “Well . . . keep a tight hold on it.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“He throws the torn paper from his window into the October breeze and returns to bed. He falls asleep watching the little fragment of light vibrate across his wall, thinking how much more efficient it would be filling an hourglass with photons instead of those unruly grains of sand.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“But, oh Viv, right doesn’t make might.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“In his room Lee wonders how to include all the history that Peters will need to make any sense of the situation.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Viv feels the hand go bloodless and numb against her neck; startled, she turns to look at his face. There is no expression at all. For a moment he is gone from his face, as though he had fallen somewhere inward, away from her and the old man and the fire, into a remote pool of himself”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“and as this need grows more intense so does a sensation of movement, speed to come, impending declaration—“The past is funny, Viv; it never seems to let things lie, finished. It never seems to stay in place as it should”—until she feels that she is beginning to run down an ever steepening hill and she must stop before the hill gets too steep and she gets going too fast to stop:”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“But in spite of her efforts to stop the words she can feel some of the need getting through: he doesn’t need me that much, he couldn’t—”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“How,” the moon whispered, “can you be sure it is lost? Until you try to find it?”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Even a man who is pure of heart
And says his prayers at night
May turn to a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
And the autumn moon is bright.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Meaning: Good night but stay. Viv, silent and slim as a shaft of sleepy light, stay, talk more to me with your articulate eyes. Hank, forget my words behind my words, stay, say some more. This is our chance. This is my chance. Say enough more for love or hate, enough more to make me sure of one or the other. Please stay, please stay .”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“With eyes like he’s been to the edge and looked over .”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“He didn’t feel he had the ability to follow her into those reveries or the right to call her back out.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“but mostly, I guess, I want to really mean something to somebody,”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“damn this world that just won’t hold still for us!”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“He had made his trip without quite realizing it.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“In the deepening sky where the spearpoint firs scratch the clouds, already a moon—like a cast-off paring from the setting sun. This is Hank’s bell, too.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Not that it was a hard country, but something you must go through a winter of to understand. But that’s what you did not know. You knew the cursed look of wanderlust but you did not know the hell that lust was leading you into. You must go through a winter first. . . .”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“The days are the same, though, damn it (days that you feel like pages of soft wet sandpaper in your fingers, the silent pliant teeth of time eating away); the summers are the same.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“That first day still came about as close to undoing me completely, both physically and mentally, as any day had in almost a week.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Doctor … I’m going mad; the final complete flip, it’s swooping down out of the hills at me!” He had only smiled, condescendingly and therapeutically. “No, Leland, not you. You, and in fact quite a lot of your generation, have in some way been exiled from that particular sanctuary. It’s become almost impossible for you to ‘go mad’ in the classical sense. At one time people conveniently ‘went mad’ and were never heard from again. Like a character in a romantic novel. But now”—And I think he even went so far as to yawn—“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. 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 short hitch at Bellevue and certainly good for another five years as a paying patient—but I’m afraid never completely out.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Hank brooded behind a newspaper with heavy, rumbling silence, and Lee, smoking and staring out of the kitchen window with tragic, defeated eyes and an anemic pallor to his cheeks, didn't look capable of sustaining the shock of a haircut, let alone the loss of a mouthful of teeth.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Boney Stokes was this oldtime acquaintance of Henry's and figured the best way to pass the time of day was by gradually dying.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion