“It's like a boulder rolling down a hill - you can watch it and talk about it and scream and say Shit! but you can't stop it. It's just a question of where it's going to go.”

Tom Wolfe

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Quote by Tom Wolfe: “It's like a boulder rolling down a hill - you ca… - Image 1

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“None of us are going to deny what other people are doing. If saying bullshit is somebody's thing, then he says bullshit. If somebody is an ass-kicker, then that's what he's going to do on this trip, kick asses. He's going to do it right out front and nobody is going to have anything to get pissed off about. He can just say, 'I'm sorry I kicked you in the ass, but I'm not sorry I'm an ass-kicker. That's what I do, I kick people in the ass.' Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about. What we are, we're going to wail with on this whole trip.”


“They're just beginning to open the doors in their minds""But once you've been through that door, you can't just keep going through it over and over again...”


“The Pranksters were now out among them, and it was exhilarating--look at the mothers staring!--and there was going to be holy terror in the land. But there would also be people who would look up out of their work-a-daddy lives in some town, some old guy, somebody's stenographer, and see this bus and register...delight, or just pure open-invitation wonder. Either way, the Intrepid Travelers figured, there was hope for these people. They weren't totally turned off...the citizens were suitably startled, outraged, delighted, nonplused, and would wheel around and start or else try to keep their cool by sidling glances like they weren't going to be impressed by any weird shit--and a few smiled in a frank way as if to say, I am with you--if only I could be with you!”


“A person has all sorts of lags built into him Kesey is saying. Once the most basic is the sensory lag the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it takes if you are the most alert person alive and most people are a lot slower than that.... You can't go any faster than that... We are all doomed to spend the rest of our lives watching a movies of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1 30th of a second ago. We think we are in the present but we aren't. The present we know is only a movies of the past and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means.”


“Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about.”


“If you flip a coin 1000 times, eventually it's going to roll away someplace where you can't get it.”