The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Quotes
"The worst are shiny black shoes with shoelaces in them."
"One’s parents remembered the sloughing common order, War & Depression—but Superkids knew only the emotional surge of the great payoff, when nothing was common any longer—"
"He looks taller than he really is, maybe because of his neck."
"I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph."
"It’s funny, there are guys in jail who have been in jail so much, that’s their whole thing. They’re jail freaks."
"This is the way they have been living for months, for years, some of them, across America and back, on the bus, down to the Rat lands of Mexico and back, sailing like gypsies along the Servicenter fringes, copping urinations, fencing with rotten looks—"
"In fact, everybody is quiet. It is all cool."
"The whole old-style hip life—jazz, coffee houses, civil rights, invite a spade for dinner, Vietnam—it was all suddenly dying, I found out, even among the students at Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco, which had been the heart of the 'student-rebellion' and so forth."
"If you don’t realize that I’ve been helping you with every fiber in my body… if you don’t realize that everything I’ve done, everything I’ve gone through…"
"But once you’ve been through that door, you can’t just keep going through it over and over again—"
"But a few years previous he had been listed in Who’s Who and asked to speak at such auspicious gatherings as the Wellesley Club in Dah-la and now they wouldn’t even allow him to speak at a VDC [Vietnam Day Committee] gathering."
"The work-a-daddy faces could not be seen from scenic old Route 84."
"Early in 1964, just a small group on hand as yet."
"They built a whole wooden store, these notorious mothers."
"It was always sunny and cool at the same time, like a perfect fall day all year around."
"Sandy could see that Kesey wasn’t primarily an outdoorsman."
"It’s a slightly weird path here that the three loggers take."
"The whole other world that LSD opened your mind to existed only in the moment itself—Now—"
"We used to be equals. Now it’s Kesey’s trip."
"He was fat and sloppy-looking and had a particularly gross-looking Army crewcut."
"They couldn’t know about the LSD experience, because that door had never opened for them."
"Come on, Bob. It won’t take you an hour. You can get here in thirty minutes."
"The intrepid traveler just gets up and walks out and he’s here!"
"The acid was in some orange juice in the refrigerator and you drank a paper cup full of it and you were zonked."
"He starts backing off toward his car, cutting one last look at the crazies."
"We’re show people. It’s been a long row to hoe, I can tell you."
"The bus also had great possibilities for altering the usual order of things."
"We could go through the face of America muddling people’s minds."
"No sea of flames now, just a green and gold sea, serene, coming from out of the stream of the Northlands themselves."
"Telepathic Kathy! Just one line, one current, running through the entire bus."
"The unquenchable Hagen of the Screw Shack prowls the Stampede for ginch ahoof."
"Everywhere Kesey and Babbs up top the bus with flutes, mercilessly tootling the people of America."
"They are above the multitudes, looking down from the Furthur heights of the bus."
"The trouble with Leary and his group is that they have turned back."
"Would you rather climb the mountain or have a helicopter deposit you on the top?"
"This is control tower, clear Runway One, the cougar microbes approach."
"The lumps in your mattress are carnivore spores, venereal butterflies sent by the Combine to mothproof your brain."
"You can’t just sit on it and possess it, you’ve got to move off of it and give it to other people. It only works if you bring other people into it."
"What if—and you’ll never know until you do it if you have the POWER!"
"It’s like we’re strands of wire intertwined in a great cable that runs through a slot."
"They don’t—they can’t see that these 'circles' are just cross sections of wires that run backward and forward infinitely."
"The world is flat, it is supported by forty, or maybe four, men, one at each corner, like the cosmic turtles and elephants in the mythology books."
"In short, Mountain Girl is 18 and she is pregnant, but this is Kesey…"
"Suddenly it seemed like the Pranksters could draw the whole universe into … the movie."
"Kesey’s saving grace was that he never got serious where he could say it just as well with a cosmic joke."
"You could not help being drawn, almost physically, towards him…like being sucked in by a vast, spiritual vacuum cleaner."
"The mysteries of the synch! Very strange… the Acid Tests turned out, in fact, to be an art form foreseen."
"At first they led neither to fierce conflicts nor personal reproaches or insults—at first we were still an inseparable, united brotherhood throughout the world."
"If society wants me to be an outlaw, then I'll be an outlaw, and a damned good one."
"There’s only one thing to do… there’s only one thing’s gonna do any good at all… And that’s everybody just look at it, look at the war, and turn your backs and say… Fuck it."
"I, Ken Kesey, being of (ahem) sound mind and body, do hereby leave the whole scene to Faye, Corporation, cash and the works."
"I think what decided me was someone’s description of Art Kunkin’s spontaneous participation and enjoyment of the evening in the church."
"It was legally leased for 24 or 48 hours by Kesey’s group, with money, and the caretaker of the center was present at all times during the Acid Test."
"Remember now, I’m a novice. I’d never even been ‘high’ on ‘pot’ or any kind of pill or anything."
"This may explain why a lot of people were digging the film, laughing."
"I looked around and people’s faces were distorted … lights were flashing everywhere."
"I wasn’t afraid any more and started to look around."
"They started in my toes and every inch of me was quivering with them."
"There was much activity in the large room. People were dancing and the band was playing."
"Mostly I’d call the Acid Test a master production."
"At least six different groups of police… starting with the Compton City police."
"You have to know how to approach them, says Mario."
"They look at you just like a head, totally open, wanting to find something rather than hide something."
"Please may I ask you this. We have a report on one of these Russians who maybe was landing here from a submarine."
"You're a leader, a prophet, you might say, and you have an important message, and I dig that, you know? I respect that."
"Twenty-seven parts!—all moving, doesn’t anyone see that this is a main chance, this dance at California Hall, in the impresario game."
"Hell, man! Join forces with the Pranksters. Move your scene to Winterland, co-sponsor it."
"We have a certain number of people we want to get close to us, and they're going to be here and it's going to be better than anything we could have done at Winterland."
"It's great to be a part of the greatest jackoff in history."
"They walk different... I can hear it in the music... It used to go life—death, life—death... but now it's death—life, death—life."
"But until we start going that far... and then going beyond... we're not going to experience anything new."
"A dead towhee and a rumpled road and lying in the dust, a mistake... a mistake, but it's not important."
"Making a mistake is not important... it's the context in which the mistake is made."