Novelists From The United States

"Without love, we are birds with broken wings."

"Don't hang on too long, but don't let go too soon."

"Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone."

"Love each other or perish."

"As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed as ignorant as you were at twenty-two, you'd always be twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth. It's more than the negative that you're going to die, it's the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it."

"Love wins. Love always wins."

"Death: the only true emotion felt in an apathetic world"

"When you're in bed, you're dead"

"Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too - even when you’re in the dark. Even when you’re falling."

"The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in."

"Death ends a life, not a relationship."

"When you learn how to die, you learn how to live."

"You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven't found meaning. Because if you’ve find meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward."

"Do the kinds of things that come from the heart. When you do, you won’t be dissatisfied, you won’t be envious, you won’t be longing for somebody else’s things. On the contrary, you’ll be overwhelmed with what comes back."

"Extremists think "communication" means agreeing with them."

"What's green, hangs on a wall and whistles?"

"Conservative: One who admires radicals a century after they're dead."

"The purpose of life is not to be happy at all. It is to be useful, to be honorable. It is to be compassionate. It is to matter, to have it make some difference that you lived."

"Maybe not you, buddy, but the rest are even scared to open up and laugh. You know, that's the first thing that got me about this place, that there wasn't anybody laughing. I haven't heard a real laugh since I came through that door, do you know that? Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing."

"I can't help it. I was born a miscarriage. I had so many insults I died. I was born dead. I can't help it.... I'm tired."

"This is what I know. The ward is a factory for the Combine. It's for fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in the schools and in the churches, the hospital is. When a completed product goes back out into society, all fixed up good as new, better than new sometimes, it brings joy to the Big Nurse's heart; something that came in all twisted and different is now a functioning, adjusted component, a credit to the whole outfit and a marvel to behold."

"Mr. Bibbit, you might warn this Mr. Harding that I'm so crazy I admit to voting for Eisenhower. Bibbit! You tell Mr. McMurphy I'm so crazy I voted for Eisenhower twice! And you tell Mr. Harding right back — he puts both hands on the table and leans down, his voice getting low — that I'm so crazy I plan to vote for Eisenhower again this November."

"He who marches out of line hears another drum."

"Damn, what a sorry-looking outfit. You boys don't look so crazy to me."

"He had gone to several universities . . . and had found only curves and credits. He had become drunk on the idea of God and found only theology. He had risen several times on the subtle and powerful wings of lust, expectant of magnificence, achieving only discharge. A few times he had extended friendship with palpitating hope, only to find that no one quite knew what he had in mind. His solitude now was the result of his metabolism, that constant breathing in of joy and exhalation of sadness."

"And then she saw, and was instantly destroyed in a way that would insist upon her living."

"All my parents gave me was their fumbly hands: I got their hands inside me to this day."

"I love you all, you hear? Nothing turns MY stomach. I'll kiss your gallstones, your ulcers, your cancers, your bleeding piles - and they'll all disappear! I'm the miracle man."

"And a blade twitched into his heart, beginning the slow, massive bleeding he would never be able to stop, no matter what else he might accomplish. He was surprised and puzzled as he walked with that mortal wound in him, for it occurred to him that, although the wound would be the death of him, it would be the life of him too."

"You gotta take your skin off, you gotta love so much that you go insane."

"Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus … or off the bus.""

"He talks in a soft voice with a country accent, almost a pure country accent, only crackling and rasping and cheese-grated over the two-foot hookup, talking about — "—there's been no creativity," he is saying, "and I think my value has been to help create the next step. I don't think there will be any movement off the drug scene until there is something else to move to —" — all in a plain country accent about something — well, to be frank, I didn't know what in the hell it was all about. Sometimes he spoke cryptically, in aphorisms. I told him I had heard he didn't intend to do any more writing. Why? I said. "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph," he said. He talked about something called the Acid Test and forms of expression in which there would be no separation between himself and the audience. It would be all one experience, with all the senses opened wide, words, music, lights, sounds, touch — lightning."

"McMurphy is not merely up against the Big Nurse and her ward, but against all the controlling aspects of society, which molds its conformists into dull mechanical robots for the Combine."

"Kesey practices what has come to be known as Gonzo journalism. The reporter, often intoxicated, fails to get the story but delivers instead a stylishly bizarre account that mocks conventional journalism."

"Big Nurse speaks for the fixed pattern, the unbreakable routine, the submission of individual will to mechanical, humorless control. McMurphy speaks an older American language of freedom, unhindered movement, self-reliance, anarchic humour and a trust in the more animal instincts."

"Kesey creates finally in McMurphy a modern unhero or anti-hero who expands himself, through a gradual shift in his concern from himself to those around him, into the role of the traditional hero. It is a strange and preposterous role... In the modern world, such a hero, individualistic to the point of disaffiliation but at the same time altruistic to the point of self-sacrifice, is by definition absurd; and all people and actions touched by such heroism are tinted by its absurdity."

"Tripmaster was a word from the 1960s. People could be on acid, and there's a tripmaster who suggests trips for them and who guides them and keeps them from flipping out. I feel that I myself was very good at doing that. Often I would be the one who would not take drugs and the other people would take the drugs. I would make sure they were safe. Very different from Ken Kesey. I wanted to make sure that they did not go to any dangerous places, make sure they went to beautiful places with flowers and music and birds."

"There's something about what we're doing, [which] is that we're meant to lose... every time! We make these foires, write these books and perform this music, but the big juggernaut of civilization continues and we've been kind of brushed to the side, but I think 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."

"You can't bomb for a humane reason. What we should do is just Mother Teresa them to death with love. It's that old hippie nonsense but it's still the best stuff there is."

"What we hoped was that we could stop the coming end of the world."

"The real crazies who are looking for a messiah... after an hour or so they realise I'm not it and go off and look somewhere else."

"When people ask me what I think is my best work, it's the bus. There're lots of books, but there's only one bus."

"What I always wanted to be was a magician... My real upbringing when I was a teenager was doing magic shows, all over the state, with my father and brothers. Doing magic, you not only have to be able to do a trick, you have to have a little story line to go with it. And writing is essentially a trick."

"A TV crew came over 10 years or so ago, on the anniversary of the discovery of LSD, and those guys were trying to push me towards saying how bad it was. They wanted me to talk about the dark underbelly of the drug culture. And I said, I'm not going to talk about that because I've never seen it, except in kids doing stuff that I don't know about and I'm not interested in... I've never taken crack and I've never taken ecstasy; none of us has. I don't want to take some strange drug and end up chewing my tongue for 12 hours."

"LSD lets you in on something. When you're tripping, the idea of race disappears; the idea of sex disappears; you don't even know what species you are sometimes. And I don't know of anybody who hasn't come back from that being more humane, more thoughtful, more understanding."

"I have known a lot of people to go down and out — they kill themselves with alcohol or downers. But I've never known anybody to go up and out."

"You can't trust the quality any more..."

"I got high on psychedelics before I was ever drunk. I never smoked. Then LSD came by. And to me it was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened... And, of course, the best drugs ever were manufactured by the government."

"One of these days you're going to have a visitation. You're going to be walking down the street and across the street you're going to look and see God standing over there on the street corner motioning to you, saying, "Come to me, come to me." And you will know it's God, there will be no doubt in your mind — he has slitty little eyes like Buddha, and he's got a long nice beard and blood on his hands. He's got a big Charlton Heston jaw like Moses, he's stacked like Venus, and he has a great jeweled scimitar like Mohammed. And God will tell you to come to him and sing his praises. And he will promise that if you do, all of the muses that ever visited Shakespeare will fly in your ear and out of your mouth like golden pennies. It's the job of the writer in America to say, "Fuck you God, fuck you and the Old Testament that you rode in on, fuck you." The job of the writer is to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful."

"It’s the same old wilderness, just no longer up on that hill or around that bend or in the gully. It’s the fact that there is no more hill or gully, that the hollow is there and you’ve got to explore the hollow with faith. If you don’t have faith that there is something down there, pretty soon when you’re in the hollow, you begin to get scared and start shaking. That’s when you stop taking acid and start taking coke and drinking booze and start trying to fill the hollow with depressants and Valium. Real warriors like William Burroughs or Leonard Cohen or Wallace Stevens examine the hollow as well as anybody; they get in there, look far into the dark, and yet come out with poetry."