“But if they don't exist, how can a man see them?”

— Ken Kesey , book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), Ch. 7

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "But if they don't exist, how can a man see them?" by Ken Kesey?

Ken Kesey 103

novelist 1935–2001

Related quotes

“The mind can only create errors. Truths are not created, they exist; one can only see them, disentangle them, discover them, and expose them.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

“All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Slaughterhouse-Five

Billy writing a letter to a newspaper describing the Tralfamadorians
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Context: The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."