Love Quote by Ken Kesey

Kesey snaps “love” out of the greeting-card aisle and drops it onto the hard floor of judgment. Calling love “good sense” is a provocation aimed at a culture that treats romance as a weather system: it arrives, it ruins your plans, you can’t be blamed. Kesey’s line insists on agency. Love isn’t the involuntary flutter; it’s the practiced decision to see clearly, to choose well, to keep choosing when the chemical fireworks fade.

The subtext is almost moral, but not preachy. “Good sense” suggests discernment, timing, boundaries, and responsibility - the unsexy mechanics that actually keep people from hurting each other. It’s also a rebuke to self-indulgence dressed up as feeling. If love is merely an emotion, any betrayal can be excused as “I couldn’t help it.” If love is sense, then cruelty, neglect, and cowardice become failures of thought as much as failures of heart.

Kesey’s context matters. Writing out of the postwar American boom and into the psychedelic 1960s, he watched liberation rhetoric collide with human consequences. The Merry Pranksters preached expansion of consciousness; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest anatomized power, conformity, and the cost of surrendering your mind. In that light, “love is good sense” reads like a counterweight to ecstatic abandon: a reminder that freedom without judgment turns into chaos, and that real tenderness often looks less like rapture than like clarity, steadiness, and care.