But he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain.
They can’t tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.
It’s the truth, even if it didn’t happen……if they don’t exist, how can a man see them?
The stars up close to the moon were pale they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon
Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.
He couldn’t seem to get his teeth into anything. Except books. The things in books was darn near more real to him than the things breathing and eating.
I don’t think you fully understand the public, my friend; in this country, when something is out of order, then the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way.
. . .sometimes reading the same page over and over, until one sleepy afternoon something clicked, like a lock unlocking, and she saw those printed doors swing open on a vast house of words.
I don’t seem able to get it straight in my mind….
Society is what decides who’s sane and who isn’t, so you got to measure up.
All I know is this: nobody’s very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.
He’s the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people.
But I remember one thing: it wasn’t me that started acting deaf, it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.
You can’t really be strong until you can see a funny side to things.
You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself
I’d think, maybe he truly is something extraordinary. He’s what he is, that’s it. Maybe that makes him strong enough, being what he is.
To Vik Lovell who told me dragons did not exist, then led me to their lairs …
That ain’t me, that ain’t my face. It wasn’t even me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn’t even really me them; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted.
In any given situation there will always be more dumb people than smart people. We ain’t many!
Nobody’s gonna convince me I can’t do something till I try it.” — McMurphy
It isn’t by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.
He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy
Man is certain of nothing but his ability to fail. It is the deepest faith we have, and the unbeliever- the blasphemer, the dissenter- will stimulate in us the most righteous of furies.
You have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to the world from running you plumb crazy
The secret of being a top-notch con man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make him think he’s getting it.
You’re making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You’re not crazy the way they think. Yes…I see…
He’s like an old clock the won’t tell time but won’t stop neither with the hands bend out of shape and the face bare of numbers and the alarm rusted silent, an old worthless clock that keeps ticking and cuckooing without meaning nothing.
He knew you can’t really be strong until you can see a funny side of things.
It’s fall coming, I thought, I can smell that sour-molasses smell of silage, clanging the air like a bell – smell like somebody’s been burning oak leaves, left them to smolder overnight because they’re too green.
turns me on so loud it’s like no sound, everybody yelling at me hands over their ears from behind a glass wall, faces working around in talk circles but no sound from the mouths. my sound soaks up all other sound.
Loved. You can’t use it in the past tense. Death does not stop that love at all.
People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.
You can’t really be strong until you see a funny side to things.
The Grateful Dead are our religion. This is a religion that doesn’t pay homage to the God that all the other religions pay homage to.
It’s time to move on to the next step in the psychedelic revolution. We’ve reached a certain point, but we’re not moving any more.
Nowhere else in history has there ever been a flag that stands for the right to burn itself. This is the fractal of our flag. It stands for the right to destroy itself.
The truth doesn’t have to do with cruelty, the truth has to do with mercy.
There’s something about taking a plow and breaking new ground. It gives you energy.