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

January 1, 1970

Quote Details

Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Added on April 10, 2026
Unverified quote
0 likes
Novelists from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesShort story writers from the United StatesPoets from the United StatesHumanists
Original Language: English

Sources

Tom Wolfe, on Kesey's coining of the phrase "on the bus", in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Ch. VI : The Bus; as Paul Grushkin reports, in Dead Letters: The Very Best Grateful Dead Fan Mail (2011), p. 120, the statement became a famous evocation of an attitude: