Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Tom Robbins, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Tom Robbins quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 689 Tom Robbins quotes for you to read and share.
I finish the book so I can see how it's going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it's the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It's a voyage. -- Tom Robbins
Every individual has to assume responsibility for his or her own actions, even the poor and the young. A social system that decrees otherwise is inviting intellectual atrophy and spiritual stagnation. -- Tom Robbins
Upon patterned cushions that might have been honked, zig by zag, out of Ornette Coleman's horn, the odalisque exposed her flesh to a society that had grown frightened again of flesh. -- Tom Robbins
Each time we exhale, the world ends; when we inhale, there can be, if we allow it, rebirth and spiritual renewal. It all transpires inside of us. In our consciousness, in our hearts. All the time. -- Tom Robbins
The beauty of simplicity is the complexity it attracts. -- Tom Robbins
Since when has leadership been a criterion for sanity? Or vice versa. Hitler was a gifted leader, even Nixon. Exhibit leadership qualities as an adolescent, they pack you off to law school for an anus transplant. If it takes, you go into government. -- Tom Robbins
There exists a false aristocracy based on family name, property, and inherited wealth. But there likewise exists a true aristocracy based on intelligence, talent and virtue. -- Tom Robbins
Approfondement is a French word that means 'playing easily in the deep.' -- Tom Robbins
The female characters in my books tend to be independent, frisky, spunky, witty, emotionally strong, erotically daring, spiritually oriented and intellectually generous; in short, the kind of women I admire in real life. -- Tom Robbins
It was quite likely the best advice I've ever received. I can't help but wonder what my life would have been like if I'd actually followed it. -- Tom Robbins
I began to hitchhike in something akin to geological time: slow, ancient, vast. -- Tom Robbins
Water- the ace of elements. Water dives from the clouds without parachute, wings or safety net. Water runs over the steepest precipice and blinks not a lash. Water is buried and rises again; water walks on fire and fire gets the blisters. -- Tom Robbins
The ones who're so upset about everybody not being the same, about competition, about standards of quality, about art objects having 'auras' around them, they're usually people with average abilities and average minds. And below average senses of humor. -- Tom Robbins
Violence stinks no matter which side of it you're on. But now and then there's nothing left to do but hit the other person over the head with a frying pan. -- Tom Robbins
There were, in his opinion, drugs that diminished ego and drugs that engorged ego, which is to say, revelatory drugs and delusory drugs; and on a psychic level, at least, he favored awe over swagger. -- Tom Robbins
They called her a disgrace to the nurturing traditions of womankind. They threatened to paint a mustache on her and shoot off her nipples. -- Tom Robbins
Does koala bear poop smell like cough drops? -- Tom Robbins
There's probably no subject with quite so many conflictin' opinions about it as there are about food, and 'tis better to swap bubble gum with a rabid bulldog than challenge a single one o' the varyin' beliefs your average human holds about nutrition. -- Tom Robbins
Unless it was about to cause you bodily harm, rot your rhubarb on the stalk, or carry off your children, weather ought either to be celebrated or ignored. -- Tom Robbins
You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I've learned that it isn't necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It's a game, right? It's like being paid for dreaming. -- Tom Robbins
I like travelers, but I don't like tourists. The difference is that travelers don't shop and they don't play golf. -- Tom Robbins
The mission of the artist in an over-technologi zed society, is to call the old magic back to life. -- Tom Robbins
Existence can be rearranged. A man can be many things. I am special and free. And the world is round round round. -- Tom Robbins
You know what I mean? Real and unreal, beautiful and strange, like a dream. It got me high as a kite, but it didn't last long enough. It ended too soon and left nothing behind."
That's how it is with dreams," said Priscilla. "They're the perfect crime. -- Tom Robbins
They glared at her the way any intelligent persons ought to glare when what they need is a smoke, a bite, a cup of coffee, a piece of ass, or a good fast-paced story, and all they're getting is philosophy. -- Tom Robbins
Although the phrase "come back" is misleading because in the realm of meditative daydream the only way to "go there" is, paradoxically, to totally "be here. -- Tom Robbins
There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself. Answer me that and I will ease your mind about the beginning and the end of time. Answer me that and I will reveal to you the purpose of the moon. -- Tom Robbins
It's hard to say who's a greater threat to the world, an ambitious CEO with a big ad budget or a crafty cleric with an obsolete Bible verse. -- Tom Robbins
If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and
push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before,
push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of
magic. -- Tom Robbins
As they say in my country, have a nice day. -- Tom Robbins
Half Asleep in Frogg pajamas. -- Tom Robbins
You wonder if God doesn't have an answering machine to screen out the prayers of the venal and the boring? And in which category has he placed you? -- Tom Robbins
Mr. and Mrs. Hankshaw were summoned from the waiting room where Saturday Evening Post fantasies had clouded their instinctive parental concern the way that Norman Rockwell's sentimental ideas cloud the purity of a blank canvas. -- Tom Robbins
Employing women as my primary protagonists has allowed me to step outside of myself, to distance myself from my own personality, far more easily than were I to look at events from a masculine perspective. -- Tom Robbins
You are what you think you eat. -- Tom Robbins
Madame Lily Devalier always asked "Where are you?" in a way that insinuated that there were only two places on earth one could be: New Orleans and somewhere ridiculous. -- Tom Robbins
Death is not a resident of the house. 'Death' is merely the name we give to certain rooms of the house, rooms that we, the so-called 'living,' fear for the simple reason that we have not passed through them. -- Tom Robbins
Although surely she realized that space is merely a device to prevent everything from being in the same spot. -- Tom Robbins
The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce. -- Tom Robbins
There is, however, a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like part of the act. -- Tom Robbins
Political activism is seductive because it seems to offer the possibility that one can improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self. -- Tom Robbins
THE SKY IS MORE IMPERSONAL than the sea. -- Tom Robbins
And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe- and go on about our tasks -- Tom Robbins
The gods have chosen to entertain me with chronic eyestrain headaches. Very poisonous episodes. So I don't do a lot of reading anymore except on tape. -- Tom Robbins
And if your master truly loved you, he would tell you that. In order to escape the bounds of earthly experience, you bind yourself to a master. Bound is bound. If your master really loved you, he would not demand your devotion. He would set you free
from himself, first of all. -- Tom Robbins
She was even grateful at first for this backdoor entry into the New York art scene, although rather quickly she came to think of it as entering a peacock through its rectum. -- Tom Robbins
Now, in the eyes of the stars, men may be no more exalted than beasts, and kingly men no worthier than the wretched. -- Tom Robbins
We are seldom as limited as we think we are. -- Tom Robbins
Things. Cosas. Things attach themselves like leeches to the human soul, then they bleed out the sweetness and the music and the primordial joy of being unencumbered upon the land. -- Tom Robbins
A sausage is an image of rest, peace and tranquility in stark contrast to the destruction and chaos of everyday life. -- Tom Robbins
The kingdom of formal ideas will always be a weak neighbor to the kingdom of thrills -- Tom Robbins
Who knows how to make love stay?
Tell love you are going to the Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half. -- Tom Robbins
Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard. -- Tom Robbins
Carelessness is a weakness that isn't tolerated in this order, he says in a voice that the average housewife would have to take out of the freezer at two in the afternoon if she wanted it thawed in time for supper. -- Tom Robbins
They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning. -- Tom Robbins
Your petal from the salty rose -- Tom Robbins
The human race has always defined itself through narration. That isn't going to change just because we've gone electronic. What is changing is that now we're allowing corporations to tell our stories for us. -- Tom Robbins
What are the odds that two separate writers, strangers, a thousand miles apart, would each invent fictions in which guys take girls to an esoteric frog lecture on their first date? If that isn't synchronicity, it's something equally as weird. -- Tom Robbins
His voice wore no pants. -- Tom Robbins
Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it may be levity. -- Tom Robbins
I started writing when I was 5 years old. I would dictate stories to my mother, and she would copy them in a scrapbook. If she changed anything to make it, in her opinion, better, I would throw a tantrum. -- Tom Robbins
He said that when you're locked up, smoking a cigarette is like having a friend. -- Tom Robbins
Human reality is often simultaneously somber and funny. -- Tom Robbins
Never trust anyone who uses the word party as a verb but never trust anyone who would rather be grammatically correct than to party. -- Tom Robbins
If a girl wants to grow up to be a cowgirl, she ought to be able to do it, or else this world ain't worth living in. -- Tom Robbins
Don't talk about it - you'll talk it away. Let the ideas flow from your mind to the page without exposing them to air. Especially hot air. -- Tom Robbins
The purpose of art is to provide what life does not. -- Tom Robbins
To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought. -- Tom Robbins
I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis. -- Tom Robbins
In the end, perhaps we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that's continually retold in an accent too thick and strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke my friends. The soul is the punch line. -- Tom Robbins
Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef. -- Tom Robbins
Women are tough and rather coarse. They were built for the raw, crude work of bearing children. You'd be amazed at what they can do when they divert that baby-hatching energy into some other enterprise. -- Tom Robbins
There is no death. There are only different levels of life. -- Tom Robbins
Family trouble was the worst kind. Some families ran their own little versions of the Middle East. -- Tom Robbins
The goal of this generation's pioneers should be to restrict procreation and limit consumption. They should also take every opportunity to make themselves happy, realizing that the key to self-generated happiness (the only reliable kind) is the refusal to take oneself too seriously. -- Tom Robbins
We seem to face an enemy who, no matter how many times we win, will best us in the end. He has so many allies: time, disease, boredom, stupidity, religious quackery, and bad habits. -- Tom Robbins
... he glanced over his shoulder at her, regarding her, as he often did before they made love, as if she were a lost continent about to be rediscovered. -- Tom Robbins
Ellen Cherry understood then that religion was an improper response to the Divine. -- Tom Robbins
Something has got to hold it together. I'm saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue. -- Tom Robbins
Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature. -- Tom Robbins
Once, Princess Leigh-Cheri used a papal candlestick for the purpose of self-gratification. She had hoped that at the appropriate moment she might be visited by either the Lamb or the Beast, be, as usual, only Ralph Nader attended her. -- Tom Robbins
Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. -- Tom Robbins
For them not to have fucked then and there would have required such a reversal of the laws of nature as to cause Newton to spin in his coffin and NASA to discontinue the space program. -- Tom Robbins
Larry, wouldn't it be a fine thing, a swell thing, a boon to the community of man and to all creatures great and small, if this girl's soul was as ripe and stunning as her ass. -- Tom Robbins
I show up in my writing room at approximately 10 A.M. every morning without fail. Sometimes my muse sees fit to join me there and sometimes she doesn't, but she always knows where I'll be. She doesn't need to go hunting in the taverns or on the beach or drag the boulevard looking for me. -- Tom Robbins
The Japanese have become so smitten with the Western condiment - its texture as silky as a kimono, its tang as understated as the tang of Zen - that today they have a word for mayonnaise junkie: mayora. -- Tom Robbins
Do you hear, darlink, what the new dishwasher wants to be called? An 'underwater ceramics engineer,' already! Abu doesn't believe his ears. He doesn't realize what a big shot he used to be in the kitchen. Ha! -- Tom Robbins
Salvation is for the feeble, that's what I think. I don't want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb. -- Tom Robbins
My heart is a Latin American food stall and your love is a health inspector from Zurich. -- Tom Robbins
The difference between love and logic is that in the eyes of a lover, a toad can be a prince, whereas in the analysis of a logistician, the lover would have to prove that the toad was a prince, an enterprise destined to dull the shine of many a passion. -- Tom Robbins
You've remained on the battleground, center stage, experiencing life and, what's more important, experiencing yourself experiencing it. You haven't been reduced to a logistical strategy for somebody else's life-war. -- Tom Robbins
Nothing is implied here. Except the possibility that everything is connected. -- Tom Robbins
In the life of the individual, an aesthetic sensibility is both more authentic and more commendable than a political or religious one. -- Tom Robbins
If you were Jesus with missing years to kill where would you go? -- Tom Robbins
The Ides of March. A sky-lidded night plain. A star-loaded sky. A moon without a pond to primp in. A wind without a leaf to tease. A nighthawk without a wire to rest on. A couple without a corner to turn. Her sandals, his wheels, made a popcorn-eating sound in the sand. -- Tom Robbins
The first thunderstorm of the season was in the dressing room, donning its black robes and its necklace of hailstones, strapping on its electrical sword. -- Tom Robbins
The sky is as gruff as a Chinese waiter. It keeps slamming the silverware against the horizon. -- Tom Robbins
This program is subject to change
often unexpectedly, sometimes in the batting of an eye. It's the best argument I know against suicide. -- Tom Robbins
In technological development, in production of material goods and creature comforts, we've challenged the very gods, but psychologically, emotionally, we're scarcely more than chimpanzees with bulldozers, baboons with big bombs. -- Tom Robbins
The truth, from my perspective, is that the world, indeed, is ending - and is also being reborn. It's been doing that all day, every day, forever. -- Tom Robbins
It was laughter that might have been squeezed from the tubes of his own darkest heart, then amplified fifty times through the bellows of a loon's ass. -- Tom Robbins
You have to eat your technique. Digest it. It's in your blood, but you're not concerned with it anymore. -- Tom Robbins
People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve. (Bernard Mickey Wrangle, p 99) -- Tom Robbins
There were no mail-order catalogues in 1492. Marco Polo's journal was the wish book of Renaissance Europe. Then, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and landed in Sears' basement. Despite all the Indians on the escalator, Columbus' visit came to be known as a discovery. -- Tom Robbins
There's no point in saving the world if it means losing the moon. -- Tom Robbins
So, the scholars are tedious, the experts never see the whole truth of things, still they have their role to play. -- Tom Robbins
He worked too hard, smiled too little and dined as one indifferent to both flavor and fate; he clearly was a hero in need of rescue by a princess. -- Tom Robbins
A sudden squawked command caused everyone within earshot to act for a split second as if they were shaking invisible martinis -- Tom Robbins
Your author has found love to be the full trip, emotionally speaking; the grand tour: fall in love, visit both Heaven and Hell for the price of one. -- Tom Robbins
Brilliantly, ecstatically, irrepressibly. This is the way to burn -- Tom Robbins
Intimacy is the principal source of the sugars which this life is sweetened! -- Tom Robbins
Tunnel vision is caused by an optic fungus that multiplies when the brain is less energetic than the ego. It is complicated by exposure to politics. -- Tom Robbins
Among our egocentric sad-sacks, despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation. -- Tom Robbins
Why," Tanuki grumbled, "would they fell trees but leave men standing? Trees are a damn sight more useful than people, and everything in the world knows that but people. -- Tom Robbins
It had been reported that Tanuki fell from the sky using his scrotum as a parachute. -- Tom Robbins
No. No, it was a lonely writer I met one stormy day in Laguna Beach. He had a poem about Thelonious Monk that he sealed in a tin can and labeled Campbell's Cream of Piano Soup. Later I hear he killed himself to avoid the draft. -- Tom Robbins
More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn't get any better than that. -- Tom Robbins
Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally. -- Tom Robbins
It is complicated by exposure to politics. When a good dea is run through the filters and compressors of ordinary tunnel vision, it not only comps out reduced in scale and value but in its new dogmatic configuration produces effects the opposite of those for which it originally was intended." 86 -- Tom Robbins
I believe in nothing, everything is sacred. I believe in everything, nothing is sacred. -- Tom Robbins
She did know that once tattooed one could no longer expect to lie for all eternity in an orthodox Jewish cemetery. They wouldn't even bury women with pierced ears. A strange theory of mutilation from the people who invented cutting the skin off the pee-pee. -- Tom Robbins
You can't rest in the shade of a human, not even a roly-poly one; and isn't it refreshing that trees can undergo periodic change without having a nervous breakdown over it? -- Tom Robbins
Human folly does not impede the turning of the stars. -- Tom Robbins
The function of the artist,' the Navajo answered, 'is to provide what life does not. -- Tom Robbins
Yet, when struck at a particular angle by a flicker of candlelight from the chandelier, its heart of wine-drenched velvet shone through. -- Tom Robbins
We do know that she's compassionate and eccentric - an excellent combination in a human being; -- Tom Robbins
When I go to the shore, I take along the poems of Pablo Neruda. I suppose it's because the poems are simultaneously lush and ripe and kind of lazy, yet throbbing with life - like summer itself. -- Tom Robbins
What difference does it make if the Gospel is mostly a lie? It's an engrossing story and the words of its hero are excellent words to live by, even today. -- Tom Robbins
There are only two mantras, yum and yuck, mine is yum. -- Tom Robbins
The Earth is God's pinball machine and each quake, tidal wave, flash flood and volcanic eruption is the result of a TILT that occurs when God, cheating, tries to win free games. -- Tom Robbins
You knows dat in New Orleans is not morning 'til dee sun come up. -- Tom Robbins
The greatest men that ever live pass away unknown. they put forth no claims for themselves, establish no schools of systems in their name. they never create or stir but just melt down into love -- Tom Robbins
Some marriages are made in heaven,
Mine was made in Hong Kong, by the same people who make those little rubber pork chops they sell in the pet department at Kmart. -- Tom Robbins
If every time we choose a turd, society, at a great expense, simply allows us to redeem it for a pepperoni, then not only will we never learn to make smart choices, we will also surrender the freedom to choose, because a choice without consequences is no choice at all. -- Tom Robbins
Very few people can write in a crowd. This is a very solitary occupation. I have known people more talented than me who never made it. And the primary reason was always that they couldn't stand to be alone for several hours a day. Any writer worth anything has mastered the art. The art of solitude. -- Tom Robbins
I'll bet I'm as old as you are."
"I'm older than Sanskrit."
"Well, I was waitress at the Last Supper."
"I'm so old I remember when McDonald's had only sold a hundred burgers."
"You win. -- Tom Robbins
In a voice that sounds the way a can of cheap dog food would sound if a can of cheap dog food could speak, he tells you you are looking well. -- Tom Robbins
To the domesticated, nomads were an unwelcome reminder of instinct suppressed, liberty compromised, and control unimplemented. -- Tom Robbins
I'm not infatuated with frivolousness. We're just good friends. -- Tom Robbins
There is no such thing as a weird human being, It's just that some people require more understanding than others. -- Tom Robbins
The problem here, Gwen, is that the more desperate you are to achieve financial success and the tighter you hold on to what you've got, the greater your chances of losing it. Money's like love in that respect. -- Tom Robbins
I do not know why the dead do not come back to life. Perhaps death is so wonderful, in ways we cannot comprehend, that they prefer it over and above their friends and loved ones, although I am inclined to doubt that be the case. -- Tom Robbins
You don't have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House. -- Tom Robbins
If it weren't for Phoenician blinds, it'd be curtains for all of us. -- Tom Robbins
Rivers are the primal highways of life. From the crack of time, they had borne men's dreams, and in their lovely rush to elsewhere, fed our wanderlust, mimicked our arteries, and charmed our imaginations in a way the static pond or vast and savage ocean never could. -- Tom Robbins
Naked, she lay sprawled on her side like a shipwrecked cello. -- Tom Robbins
Simultaneously a frantic, high-tech juggernaut and a timeless Asian dream, Bangkok straddles like no other metropolis the boundary between acrid and sweet, soft and hard, sacred and profane. It's a silk buzz saw, a lacquered jackhammer, a steel-belted seduction, a digital prayer. -- Tom Robbins
Virtually every advancement made by our species since civilization first peeked out of its nest of stone has been initiated by lone individuals, mavericks who more often than not were ignored, mocked, or viciously persecuted by society and its institutions. -- Tom Robbins
It's been said that golf is a Zen activity. I'd argue that if golfers were practicing Zen, they wouldn't keep score. -- Tom Robbins
There are apparently few limitations either of time or space on where the psyche might journey and only the customs inspector employed by our own inhibitions restricts what it might bring back when it reenters the home country of everyday consciousness. -- Tom Robbins
From the outside, my life may look chaotic, but inside I feel like some kind of monk licking an ice cream cone while straddling a runaway horse. -- Tom Robbins
As expected, you get his machine. Someday, even the "call of nature" will be answered by a machine. -- Tom Robbins
Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air - moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh - felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. -- Tom Robbins
Once, in a spasm of sappiness, you asked Q-Jo if she thought your dreams would ever come true. 'You aren't talking about dreams,' she corrected you, 'you're referring to your pathetic bourgeoisie ambitions. Dreams don't come true. Dreams are true. -- Tom Robbins
We've produced a generation of spiritual panhandlers, begging for coins of wisdom, banging like bums on every closed door ... if an old man moves into a shack or a cave and lets his beard grow, people will flock from miles around just to read his "no trespassing" sign -- Tom Robbins
Live the beauty or your own reality. -- Tom Robbins
Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable. -- Tom Robbins
Choice. It's the word that allows yes and the word that makes no possible. It's the word that puts the free in freedom and takes obligation out of the mix. It's the word upon which adventure, exhilaration, and authenticity depend. It's the word that the cocoon whispers to the caterpillar. -- Tom Robbins
Had Ken Kesey opened Electric Kool-Aid stands on every college campus in the country, it would have made a lesser contribution than Life to the creation of that era of unprecedented foment we like to call the sixties. -- Tom Robbins
Wasn't crying. I've had a bad day. Another one. One in a series of bad days. I'm not complaining. Bad days are my bag. They're time-consuming, however, and I'm a busy girl. -- Tom Robbins
Logic only gives a man what he needs ... Magic gives him what he wants. -- Tom Robbins
When a culture is being dumbed down as effectively as ours is, its narrative arts (literature, film, theatre) seem to vacillate between the brutal and the bland, sometimes in the same work. -- Tom Robbins
He was becoming unstuck, he was sure of that - his bones were no longer wrapped in flesh but in clouds of dust, in hummingbirds, dragonflies, and luminous moths - but so perfect was his equilibrium that he felt no fear. He was vast, he was many, he was dynamic, he was eternal. -- Tom Robbins
The pain of love does not break hearts, it merely seasons them. The disappointed heart revives itself and grows meaty and piquant. Sorrow expands it and makes it pithy. The spirit, on the other hand, can snap like a bone and may never fully knit -- Tom Robbins
Must look into the botanical background of substance known as hashish, I jotted in my journal, writing by the light of candles that grew incessantly jewel-like even as protean wafts of incense approached my snout like platters of ripe fruits borne on the back of Nubian pages. -- Tom Robbins
On the subject of Egypt, Ellen Cherry was so vague she thought Ramses II was a jazz piano player. From that, we might conclude that she was equally dumb about jazz. -- Tom Robbins
The harsh truth is, most red-haired men look like blondes who've spoiled from lack of refrigeration. They look like brown-haired men who've been composted out behind the barn. Yet that same pigmentation that on a man can resemble leaf mold or junkyard rust, a woman wears like a tiara of rubies. -- Tom Robbins
Summer had come to sit on New York's face. -- Tom Robbins
Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need. -- Tom Robbins
Bland writing - timid, antiseptic, vanilla writing - is nearly as unhealthy as the brutal and dark. Instead of sipping, say, elixir, nectar, tequila, or champagne, the reader is invited to slurp lumpy milk or choke on the author's dust bunnies. -- Tom Robbins
Beer's nice for being glad and dizzy, and sometimes for the mystery and stuff, but the happy that comes out of a beer can is not like the real happy you got to make in your heart. -- Tom Robbins
The highest men are calm, silent and unknown ... The true masters seldom reveal themselves, except in the vibrations the leave behind, and upon which the lesser gurus build their doctrines. -- Tom Robbins
I've sucked way too much cement for this year. Bad juju rising off them city sidewalks. I need to babble with a brook or two, inhale starlight, make friends with some trees. -- Tom Robbins
I travel in gardens and bedrooms, basements and attics, around corners, through doorways and windows, along sidewalks, over carpets, down drainpipes, in the sky, with friends, lovers, children and heros; perceived, remembered, imagined, distorted and clarified. -- Tom Robbins
Listen, I've been sick ever since I started working here, but today I'm well and I won't be in anymore. -- Tom Robbins
Like two r's trapped in a spanish songbook, tilli and max lurked in their shoebox castle, waiting to be rolled. -- Tom Robbins
Turn a mountain upside down, you have a woman. Turn a woman upside down, you have a valley. Turn a valley upside down, you get folk music. -- Tom Robbins
Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have known all along that it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek. -- Tom Robbins
Writing is the hardest physical work there is. -- Tom Robbins
Danger is to adventure what garlic is to spaghetti sauce. Without it, you just end up with stewed tomatoes. -- Tom Robbins
I went to a large consolidated school in Appalachia. And I wrote the story when I was in the second grade and I took it up to the third floor to the school newspaper office that was written and edited by juniors and seniors. -- Tom Robbins
My comic sense, although deliberately Americanized, is, in its intent, much closer related to the crazy wisdom of Zen monks and the goofy genius of Taoist masters than it is to, say, the satirical gibes on Saturday Night Live. It has both a literary and a metaphysical function. -- Tom Robbins
How could you be so naive as to tell a human being the truth? Men live by embedding themselves in ongoing systems of illusion. Religion. Patriotism. Economics. Fashion. That sort of thing. If you wish to gain the favor of the two-legged ilk, you must learn to fabricate as wholeheartedly as they do. -- Tom Robbins
Plato did claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure. -- Tom Robbins
There're many ways, my dear, to victimize people. The most insidious way is to persuade them that they're victims. -- Tom Robbins
It was 843 B.C.. The year the patriarchs won the pennant. -- Tom Robbins
I am cheerful. I don't know if I'm happy. There is a difference, you know. -- Tom Robbins
How can men be such lummoxes, such wads of chewing gum on our ballet slippers and still feel so good? -- Tom Robbins
How can you admire a human who consciously embraces the bland, the mediocre, and the safe rather than risk the suffering that disappointment can bring? -- Tom Robbins
I have never ever Googled myself; in fact I think the Christian right prohibits such things. -- Tom Robbins
Well, I have never, ever Googled myself. -- Tom Robbins
Comedy is deemed inferior to tragedy primarily because of the social prevalence of narcissistic pathology. In other words people who are too self important to laugh at their own frequently ridiculous behavior have vested interest in gravity because it supports their illusions of grandosity. -- Tom Robbins
Here's an idea: let's get over ourselves, buy a cherry pie, and go fall in love with life. -- Tom Robbins
I'd like to think that had I known the truth, I might have been a kinder, more loving person. If only we knew the Truth, mightn't we all? -- Tom Robbins
Never be afraid to make a fool of yourself. The furthest out you can go is the best place to be. -- Tom Robbins
Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical. -- Tom Robbins
Morality depends on culture. Culture depends on climate. -- Tom Robbins
Girl, I'd warn you that God Almighty's goin' to strike you dead, exceptin' I been warnin' your mama that for years, and he in his infinite mercy has so far seen fit to withhold his lightnin'. -- Tom Robbins
His first - and worst - mistake was blindly doing what he was told to do. Without questioning their methods or their motives, he allowed politicians to make the decisions that led to his early demise. -- Tom Robbins
Pastor of the Warsaw Baptist Church, Dr. Peters was tall, gaunt, and pale, with a weak damp smile and cold damp palms: shaking his hand was like being forced to grasp the flaccid penis of a hypothermic zombie. -- Tom Robbins
I've decided to take advantage of outsourcing. My next novel will be written by a couple of guys in Bangalore, India. -- Tom Robbins
With me, something different and deep, in bright focus and pointing the way, arrived in the practice of hitchhiking. I am the spirit and the heart of hitchhiking, I am its cortex and its medulla, I am its foundation and its culmination, I am the jewel in its lotus. -- Tom Robbins
Of our nine planets, Saturn is the one that looks like fun. -- Tom Robbins
How we shape our understanding of others' lives is determined by what we find memorable in them, and that in turn is determined not by any potentially accurate overview of another's personality but rather by the tension and balance that exist in our daily relationships. -- Tom Robbins
Our great human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain. -- Tom Robbins
It's never too late to have a happy childhood. -- Tom Robbins
Love is dope, not chicken soup. -- Tom Robbins
Plans are one thing and fate another. When they coincide, success results. Yet success mustn't be considered the absolute. It is questionable, for that matter, whether success is an adequate resposne to life. Success can eliminate as many options as failure. -- Tom Robbins
To live fully, one must be free, but to be free one must give up security. Therefore, to live one must be ready to die. How's that for a paradox? -- Tom Robbins
Size is important, no matter what our apologist sisters say. -- Tom Robbins
Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere - the sudden revelation that there is a there out there. -- Tom Robbins
Unfortunately, little darlings, there is no such thing as a simple love story.The most transitory puppy crush is complex to the extent of lying beyond the far reaches of the brain's understanding. -- Tom Robbins
Never be afraid to love, not even when there's a chance you're not being loved in return. -- Tom Robbins
It was the premise of conference organizers that the Church's continued hostility toward women threatened both their religious lives and, due to its intractable ban on artificial birth control, their physical lives. -- Tom Robbins
This lonely, uncompromising, obsessive tug-of-war with presumed reality, this is what art is all about. -- Tom Robbins
True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. -- Tom Robbins
To specialize is to brush one tooth. When a person specializes he channels all of his energies through one narrow conduit; he knows one thing extremely well and is ignorant of almost everything else. -- Tom Robbins
If God didn't prefer for us to drink at night, he wouldn't have made neon! -- Tom Robbins
When I sit down to write, I just let the goose out of the bottle. -- Tom Robbins
Can't they comprehend that not ever'thing's done for a paycheck? That sometimes you just make a thing 'cause you wanna see how it'll turn out, 'cause you have a feeling in your gut that it oughta be made? -- Tom Robbins
The sky was the color of Edgar Allan Poe's pajamas. -- Tom Robbins
The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. -- Tom Robbins
Actually, there are countless ways to live upon this tremorous sphere in mirth and good health, and probably only one way - the industrial, urbanized, herding way - to live here stupidly, and man has hit upon that one way. -- Tom Robbins
Education is for growth and fulfillment. -- Tom Robbins
The new wrinkle is that escalating advances in technology are nourishing the narcissistic ego the way chicken manure nourishes a rose bush, while exploding worldwide population is allowing its effects to multiply geometrically. -- Tom Robbins
A hamburger is an icon of layered circles, the circle being at once the most spiritual and the most sensual of shapes. -- Tom Robbins
Now I'd fallen into it like a drunk hobo falling into a vat of champagne. -- Tom Robbins
People feel tremendous pressure to settle down in some sort of permanent space and fill it up with stuff, but deep inside they resent those structures, and they're scared to death of that stuff because they know it controls them and restricts their movements. -- Tom Robbins
In fiction, when you paint yourself into a corner, you can write a pair of suction cups onto the bottoms of your shoes and walk up the wall and out the skylight and see the sun breaking through the clouds. In nonfiction, you don't have that luxury. -- Tom Robbins
The professor had refused surgery for the rupturing aorta that was wiping his personal equation off the blackboard of life. "It is tasteless to prolong life artificially," Einstein had told his physicians. -- Tom Robbins
To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being. -- Tom Robbins
I've begun to picture my abdominal cavity occupied instead by a single glowing globe, -- Tom Robbins
(Claude and Marcel LeFever were speaking in French. This simultaneous English translation is being beamed to the reader via literary satellite.) -- Tom Robbins
The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves. -- Tom Robbins
There's a direct link between the buffalo hunts and Vietnam, said Switters. -- Tom Robbins
Logic only gives man what he needs," he stammered. "Magic gives him what he wants. -- Tom Robbins
Tilli stroked her Chihuahua. Max's heart made a sound like the sleigh bells on Mrs. Santa Claus's dildo. -- Tom Robbins
It is more important to be free than to be happy. -- Tom Robbins
As we drive up the river road, there are sixty thousand trees which I see but do not touch. Like me, Amanda is confined in the speeding Jeep, but she touches every tree. -- Tom Robbins
The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.' -- Tom Robbins
Is this blasphemy, my lord?"
"I think not. Those who crafted me, be they gods or demons, crafted this mind that shapes my resistance to their schemes. Surely they were wise enough, at the wheel where I was thrown, to anticipate future resistance in the heart they were abuilding. -- Tom Robbins
So it was that neither for the first time nor the last my verbal mojo, my knack for the written word, served to save my reckless ass. -- Tom Robbins
A spirit cannot soar with only one wing. -- Tom Robbins
The sky was the color of Edgar Allen Poe's pajamas. -- Tom Robbins
That's the value of the artist ... Even when they aren't aware, they're dreaming our dreams for us. -- Tom Robbins
When we accept small wonders, we qualify ourselves to imagine great wonders. -- Tom Robbins
In order to tame death, they refuse to completely enjoy life. In rejecting complete enjoyment, they are half-dead in advance - and that with no guarantee that their sacrifice will actually benefit them when all is done. -- Tom Robbins
Every day is Judgement Day. Always has been. Always will be. -- Tom Robbins
One tended to lose one's bearings in the presence of willful and persistent acts of craziness, and the more gentle the act, the crazier it seemed, as if rage and violence, being closer to the norm, were easier to accommodate. -- Tom Robbins
Hard times and funky living can season the soul, true enough, but joy is the yeast that makes it rise. -- Tom Robbins
When a man confines an animal in a cage, he assumes ownership of that animal. But an animal is an individual; it cannot be owned. When a man tries to own an individual, whether that individual be another man, an animal or even a tree, he suffers the psychic consequences of an unnatural act. -- Tom Robbins
Meet me in Cognito, baby. In Cognito, we'll have nothing to hide. -- Tom Robbins
She thought of the things that lovely young women usually think about when they are relaxing in treetops and unhampered by underwear. -- Tom Robbins
Should one be shallow enough to view existence as a system of rewards and punishments, one soon learns that we pay as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. -- Tom Robbins
You may tell the greatest lies and wear a brilliant disguise, but you can't escape the eyes of the one who sees right through you. -- Tom Robbins
On second thought, it's unlikely that anybody can teach another to excel in bed. Rather, what they might do is awaken in the other her or his predisposition for copulative excellence. -- Tom Robbins
The trickster's function is to break taboos, create mischief, stir things up. In the end, the trickster gives people what they really want, some sort of freedom. -- Tom Robbins
Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business. -- Tom Robbins
To the extent that this world surrenders its richness and diversity, it surrenders its poetry; to the extent that it relinquishes its capacity to surprise, it relinquishes its music; to the extent that it loses its ability to tolerate ridiculous and even dangerous exceptions, it loses its grace. -- Tom Robbins
Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. -- Tom Robbins
Rap music ... sounds like somebody feeding a rhyming dictionary to a popcorn popper. -- Tom Robbins
At birth, we emerge from dream soup. At death, we sink back into dream soup. In between soups, there is a crossing of dry land. Life is a portage. -- Tom Robbins
Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them 'deadlines. -- Tom Robbins
Religion is a paramount contributor to human misery. It is not merely the opium of the masses, it is the cyanide. -- Tom Robbins
Morels are ugly in the skillet. The caps look like the scrotums of leprechauns, the stems like the tusks of fetal elephants. -- Tom Robbins
true freedom was an internal condition not subject to the vagaries of politics. Freedom could not be owned. Therefore, it could not be appropriated. -- Tom Robbins
Well, there's one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich. -- Tom Robbins
It was a bright, defrosted, pussy-willow day at the onset of spring, and the newlyweds were driving cross-country in a large roast turkey. -- Tom Robbins
Every time a person goes to the mall, she loses a little piece of her soul -- Tom Robbins
To wit: actions, like sounds, divide the flow of time into beats.[ ... ]The quality of a man's life depends on the rhyhmic structure he is able to impose upon the input and output of energy. -- Tom Robbins
The Devil doesn't make us do anything. The Devil, for example, doesn't make us mean. Rather, when we're mean, we make the Devil. Literally. Our actions create him. Conversely, when we behave with compassion, generosity, and grace, we create God in the world. -- Tom Robbins
Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished. -- Tom Robbins
SOUTH RICHMOND was a neighborhood of mouse holes, lace curtains, Sears catalogs, measles epidemics, baloney sandwiches - and men who knew more about the carburetor than they knew about the clitoris. -- Tom Robbins
Okay, it is what it is and I am what I it, but its isness and my itness seem to be stretching the meaning of "is" and "it. -- Tom Robbins
Personally, I prefer Stevie Wonder," confessed the Chink, "but what the hell. Those cowgirls are always bitching because the only radio station in the area plays nothing but polkas, but I say you can dance to anything if you really feel like dancing." To prove it, he got up and danced to the news. -- Tom Robbins
Beer does not satisfy magic, however. So the magic ordered a round of Harvey Wallbangers. But it takes more than vodka to fuel magic. It takes risks. It takes EXTREMES. -- Tom Robbins
Redheads are said to be children of the moon, thwarted by the sun and addicted to sex and sugar. -- Tom Robbins
In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak. -- Tom Robbins
I may be mad, he thought, but I prefer the shit of this world to whatever sweet ambrosias the next may offer. -- Tom Robbins
[R]ed hair is slow to lay back once it's got its dandruff up, and her bitchy mood required further opportunity to express itself. -- Tom Robbins
Hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you're brown, you'll find out you're blue. As blue as indigo. And you know what that means. Indigo. Indigoing. Indigone. -- Tom Robbins
Those same forces that drive a genius to create the things or ideas that entertain or enlighten us often gobble so much of his personality that he has none left for the social graces. -- Tom Robbins
I rather like the smell of absurdity in the morning. -- Tom Robbins
You should never hesitate to trade your cow for a handful of magic beans. -- Tom Robbins
The first time that she spread her legs for him it had been like opening her jaws for the dentist. -- Tom Robbins
It's good to bear in mind that like it or not, enlightenment has always been, even in a golden age, pretty much limited to an elite. -- Tom Robbins
They were straining so desperately for admission to paradise that they had forgotten that paradise had always been their address. -- Tom Robbins
At the bat of your lashes peacocks preen. Peacocks preen, elephants remember, camels go for days without water, and dinosaurs of all types become extinct. -- Tom Robbins
She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obscured the already vague circumstances of its origins. -- Tom Robbins
What I'm saying is simply that every totalitarian society, no matter how strict, has had its underground. In fact, two undergrounds. There's the underground involved in political resistance and the underground involved in preserving beauty and fun
which is to say, preserving the human spirit. -- Tom Robbins
Like women in general, like Aries women in particular, like redheaded Aries women in greater particular, she loathed to be misunderstood. Injustice against others outraged her, injustice against herself set her to boiling like brimstone soup. -- Tom Robbins
Poetry, the best of it, is lunar and is concerned with the essential insanities. Journalism is solar (there are numerous newspapers named The Sun, none called The Moon) and is devoted to the inessential. -- Tom Robbins
If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it. -- Tom Robbins
What looks to be a wisp of cloud is actually the moon, narrow and pale like a paring snipped from a snowman's toenail. -- Tom Robbins
Maybe what I admired most about John Steinbeck is that he never mortgaged his 45-acre heart for a suite in an ivory tower. -- Tom Robbins
A child's mind is its living room; it's is going to be residing there for the rest of its earthly existence. -- Tom Robbins
But do we know how to make love stay?'
I can't even think about it. The best I can do is play it day by day. -- Tom Robbins
There are two lost continents ... We are one: the lovers. -- Tom Robbins
The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind. -- Tom Robbins
Words on a page can hypnotize you if the rhythm is right -- Tom Robbins
Throughout most of our history, nothing - not flood, famine, plague, or new weapons - has endangered humanity one-tenth as much as the narcissistic ego, with its self-aggrandizing presumptions and its hell-hound spawn of fear and greed. -- Tom Robbins
Men live by embedding themselves in ongoing systems of illusion. Religion. Patriotism. Economics. Fashion. That sort of thing. -- Tom Robbins
He who jokes in the executioners face can be destroyed, but never defeated. -- Tom Robbins
Much scientific truth proved to be as hypothetical as poetic allegory. The relationshiip of those rod-connected blue and red balls to an actual atomic structure was about the same as the relationship of Christianity to the fish or the Lamb. -- Tom Robbins
America is a nation of 270 million people: 100 million of them are gangsters, another 100 million are hustlers, 50 million are complete lunatics, and every single one of us is secretly in show business. Isn't that fabulous? -- Tom Robbins
The underworld persists because society needs it, insists upon it, supports it (at the same time that it denies and persecutes it, of course). -- Tom Robbins
'Neotenty' is 'remaining young,' and it may be ironic that it is so little known, because human evolution has been dominated by it. -- Tom Robbins
If complexity doesn't beat you, paradox will. -- Tom Robbins
Sissy dear. Your thumbs. HOLLYWOOD SPECTACULAR. LAS VEGAS. THE ROSE BOWL. Larger than any one man's desire. -- Tom Robbins
People are never perfect, but love can be. -- Tom Robbins
The rougher the world gets around me, the sweeter I seem to myself. -- Tom Robbins
And what would our ideas of God, of religion, be like if they had come to us through the minds of women? Ever think of that? -- Tom Robbins
There are people in this world who can wear whale masks and people who cannot, and the wise know to which group they belong. -- Tom Robbins
As a grandiose self-deception, war is o' the same magnitude as religion. We embrace war or religion - usually both at the same time - as a means o' defeatin' death, but neither o' them do a blinkin' thing but sanction dyin'. Throughout history, Death's best friend has been a priest with a knife. -- Tom Robbins
I'm probably more interested in sentences than anything else in life. -- Tom Robbins
This cave within a cave, this paleolithic pussy, this decent into the deepest dark of fuck. -- Tom Robbins
The dinosaurs died so that chat rooms may flourish -- Tom Robbins
Claude could simply not imagine the couples he met at parties or passed on the street ever being locked in carnal embrace. -- Tom Robbins
And the largest piece was buried beneath a pile of offal Ziller had gathered along the bridle paths of Central Park. Naturally, as the days wore on, the exhibition began to engage senses other than sight and touch, offering somewhat of a challenge to olfactory aesthetics. -- Tom Robbins
The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine's Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's Day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed. -- Tom Robbins
Sharks are the criminals of the sea. Dolphins are the outlaws. -- Tom Robbins
There is a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like a part of the act. -- Tom Robbins
I married John Paul because I'm knocked out by his style. Because I love him and respect him and enjoy the transformations that take place as a result of our sharing the same dimensions. -- Tom Robbins
It's personal freedom, not hundred dollar bills that lights the soul's cigar. -- Tom Robbins
The stiff-witted and academic seem not to comprehend that it is entirely possible to be ironic and sincere at the same instant, that a knowing tongue in cheek does not necessarily preclude an affectionate glow in heart. -- Tom Robbins
When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free. -- Tom Robbins
Those who willingly accept being conned are as corrupt as those who con them. -- Tom Robbins
She thought these thoughts to herself as in her mind's eye she ran naked through the woods, hugging trees. -- Tom Robbins
A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences. -- Tom Robbins
They accepted my donation, so they're aware they'd better serve my interests or I'll buy some leadership that will. -- Tom Robbins
The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature. -- Tom Robbins
And it rained a fever. And it rained a silence. And it rained a sacrifice. And it rained a miracle. And it rained sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem. -- Tom Robbins
Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival. -- Tom Robbins
Genius may stand on the shoulders of giants, but it stands alone. -- Tom Robbins
Nobody quite knew what to make of the moon any more. -- Tom Robbins
People aren't trees, so it is false when they speak of roots. -- Tom Robbins
My desire was no less than before, you understand, but I no longer identified with the desire. Perhaps that is why taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of those desires. -- Tom Robbins
People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up. -- Tom Robbins
Alas, Gulietta, this was an American frog of the last quarter of the twentieth century, a time when wishing apparently no longer led to anything, and Leigh-Cheri eventually named it Prince Charming after that son-of-a-bitch who never comes though. -- Tom Robbins
Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means. -- Tom Robbins
I work with pen and paper. That's my favorite way to write. I love the way the ink sinks into the wood, soaks into the wood pulp. There's something about that process that's so organic. -- Tom Robbins
Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death. -- Tom Robbins
Anarchy is like custard cooking over a flame; it has to be constantly stirred or it sticks and gets heavy, like government. -- Tom Robbins
You know what the game of golf is, don't you? It's basketball for people who can't jump and chess for people who can't think. -- Tom Robbins
... not a fighter ... an adventurer. He doesn't attack, he engages; He doesn't defend, he expands; He doesn't destroy, he transforms; He doesn't reject, he explores; ... . -- Tom Robbins
The party in Alobar's head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: existence can be rearranged. -- Tom Robbins
Outlaws, like lovers, poets, and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon. -- Tom Robbins
Anything that says Yes to life is automatically saying No to war. -- Tom Robbins
But man by his nature is an unnatural animal. If any creature stands a chance of defeating death, it is man. -- Tom Robbins
In Seattle, I soon found that my radical ideas and aesthetic explorations - ideas and explorations that in Richmond, Virginia, might have gotten me stoned to death with hush puppies - were not only accepted but occasionally applauded. -- Tom Robbins
Any half-awake materialist well knows - that which you hold holds you. -- Tom Robbins
The most useful thing about art is it's uselessness. -- Tom Robbins
When humans were young, they were pushed around in strollers. When they were old, they were pushed around in wheelchairs. In between, they were just pushed around. -- Tom Robbins
Life is too small a container for certain individuals. Some of them, such as Alobar, huff and puff and try to expand the container. Others, such as Kudra, seek to pry the lid off and hop out. -- Tom Robbins
Kudra was amused by Alobar's tentative polka until her eyes fell upon the tumescent protrusion dancing with him. Disgusting she thought. An erection is just inappropriate. Then she realized with a shock that she was so wet that children could have sailed toy boats in her underpants. -- Tom Robbins
A sneeze travels at a peak velocity of two hundred miles per hour. A burp, more slowly; a fart, slower yet. But a kiss thrown by fingers- its departure is sudden, its arrival ambiguous, and there is no source that can state with authority what speeds are reached in its flight. -- Tom Robbins
There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for. -- Tom Robbins
Time passed. Art came off the walls and became rituals. Ritual became religion. Religion spawned science. Science led to big business. And big business, if it continues on its present, mindless trajectory, could land those lucky enough to survive its ultimate legacy back into caves again. -- Tom Robbins
The will to live cannot be overestimated as a stimulant to longevity. -- Tom Robbins
We use so much bad language that it forms a barrier between ourselves and the truth. -- Tom Robbins
On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges. -- Tom Robbins
Far out, Bobby wrote back. Next thing I know, you'll be knitting socks with Whistler's Mother. -- Tom Robbins
Life's an offensive proposition from beginning to end. Maybe those who can't tolerate offense ought to just go ahead and end it all, and maybe those who demand financial compensation for offense ought to have it ended for them. -- Tom Robbins
Pan is right," he thought. "Death can ruin a man's life even though he go on breathing. -- Tom Robbins
Christianity ... is an Eastern religion. -- Tom Robbins
Courage is where you find it. Bravery that comes from a bottle
or from book or from a sermon
lacks the full strength and purity of bravery that comes straight from the heart. -- Tom Robbins
I would only read the novels that people classify as 'beach books' if I were being held prisoner and the only alternative was the 'Book of Mormon.' -- Tom Robbins
Being able to create your own work, being able to indulge your own fantasies is so much better than journalism, so much more fulfilling than journalism, to me, that as long as I can continue to write fiction, I shall. -- Tom Robbins
Since the Goddess always has been honored in sacred groves, it is understandable that patriarchs, then as now, leaned toward deforestation. -- Tom Robbins
She puckered her bubble gum mouth until its exaggerated sensuality drew attention away from the blood-blue crescents beneath her eyes. "My bags may be packed, but I haven't left town. No wonder Ricki finds me irresistible. She's only human." Leaning -- Tom Robbins
And while meanness is a function of the insensitive, grumpiness is merely a function of the dissatisfied. -- Tom Robbins
Jackson Pollock said once, "I don't really feel that many people in this world are alive." He said, "That's why I like you, Tom. You're alive." -- Tom Robbins
Long as you're not afraid, nobody can run your life for you. Remember that. Hell is being scared of things. -- Tom Robbins
I never outline. I don't work from an outline. I have no idea where the book is going. I mean, even two-thirds of the way through, I don't know how it's going to end. -- Tom Robbins
There are no such things as synonyms!" he practically shouted. "Deluge is not the same as flood. -- Tom Robbins
If by the quarter of the twentieth century godliness wasn't next to something more interesting than cleanliness, it might be time to reevaluate our notions of godliness. -- Tom Robbins
And it rained a screaming. And it rained a rawness. And it rained a plasma. And it rained a disorder. -- Tom Robbins
Seattle, the mild green queen: wet and willing, cedar-scented, and crowned with slough grass, her toadstool scepter tilted toward Asia, her face turned ever upward in the rain; the sovereign who washes her hands more persistently than the most fastidious proctologist. -- Tom Robbins
I see you've met Desire and Fulfillment...Regret is in the kitchen making coffee. -- Tom Robbins
Elsewhere, they might call the wind Mariah, but here its name was Something Fishy. -- Tom Robbins
I'll follow him to the ends of the earth,' she sobbed. Yes, darling. But the earth doesn't have any ends. Columbus fixed that. -- Tom Robbins
Language is not the frosting, it's the cake. -- Tom Robbins
The full moon - the mandala of the sky. -- Tom Robbins
She had only the slimmest notion of what he meant, but his voice made her so horny she could barely keep from squirming, crossing her legs, or hopping about, like a little girl who had to go to the bathroom. On -- Tom Robbins
Most people do not have the guts to direct their own movie - let alone star in it. -- Tom Robbins
Dip a slice of bread in batter. That's September: yellow, gold, soft and sticky. Fry the bread. Now you have October: chewier, drier, streaked with browns. The day in question fell somewhere in the middle of the french toast process. -- Tom Robbins
They've built their nests in the chimneys of my heart: those swallows that you lost. -- Tom Robbins
Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer. -- Tom Robbins
The French say that the best part of an affair is going up the stairs. -- Tom Robbins
Street Crime is the only logical response to America's drug policy just as terrorism is the only logical response to America's foreign policy -- Tom Robbins
If he's like a lot of men, he'd rather be a murderer than a fool. -- Tom Robbins
Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call sages, and those who act upon it, we call artists. -- Tom Robbins
My life is not merely a public phenomenon, it is a solitary adventure as well. -- Tom Robbins
Peeple of zee wurl, relax -- Tom Robbins
I eat so much mayonnaise they were going to send me to the Mayo Clinic. -- Tom Robbins
Curiosity, especially intellectual inquisitiveness, is what separates the truly alive from those who are merely going through the motions. -- Tom Robbins
Matters are very seldom all black or white. They can even be both at the same time - The Beer Fairy -- Tom Robbins
Muddy Waters he play in the river Joan Rivers she play in the mud Swami guru play in a big salad bowl Counting lettuce and chewing his cud -- Tom Robbins
Time, in his view, was a short, sloppy path from Eve's crayon box to the Messiah's fire box. -- Tom Robbins
Twenty candles on a cake. Twenty Camels in a pack. Twenty months in the federal pen. Twenty shots of tequila down a young girl's gullet. Twenty centuries since Our Lord's last pratfall, and after all that time we still don't know where passion goes when it goes. -- Tom Robbins
There are smiles that actually travel along telephone wires, although no engineer at Bell Laboratories could explain how it works. -- Tom Robbins
That no matter how valid, how vital, one's belief system might be, one undermines that system and ultimately negates it when one gets rigid and dogmatic in one's adherence to it. -- Tom Robbins
The very act of creation requires such focused concentration that vast areas of knowledge may be completely overlooked. Well, so what? There is no evidence that generalized skills are in any way superior to specialized brilliance. -- Tom Robbins
Timbuktu. The last pure place. Isolation being the mother of purity. All men are jealous of Timbuktu because Timbuktu is removed from men, it's the wholeness men have fractured, the sacred extreme they've traded away. -- Tom Robbins
I think science has begun to demonstrate that aging is a disease. If it is, it can be cured. -- Tom Robbins
Beer can lead men to think they're mighty and foul-mouthed women to believe themselves amusing and hip. -- Tom Robbins
Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works. -- Tom Robbins
You are an ignorant schoolgirl. You think civilization is a good thing. -- Tom Robbins
Reality whistles a different tune underwater. -- Tom Robbins
One of my books is a hallucinogen, an aphrodisiac, a mood elevator, an intellectual garage door opener, and a metaphysical trash compactor. They'll do everything except rotate your tires. -- Tom Robbins
Salvador Dali and fifty cents will get you a cup of clock melt. -- Tom Robbins
He was as nervous as a praying mantis at an atheists' picnic ... -- Tom Robbins
The way bewilderment lies upon me, I have no need of blanket. In -- Tom Robbins
Survival is not important. What matters is how you survive. -- Tom Robbins
The world is a very strange place,and the dice are always rolling -- Tom Robbins
Just because you're naked doesn't mean you're sexy. Just because you're cynical doesn't mean you're cool. -- Tom Robbins
Most Americans pay lip service to the idea of freedom, but can't handle real freedom. -- Tom Robbins
Me? I stand for uncertainty, insecurity, bad taste, fun, and things that go boom in the night. -- Tom Robbins
We each took a fierce delight in introducing the other to some new idea or development, the next amazing artist or record album, always hustling to out-avant the other's garde. -- Tom Robbins
If he weren't a stick his own self, I'd say he had a stick up his butt. -- Tom Robbins
Hitchhiking is not a sport. It is not an art. It certainly isn't work, for it requires no particular ability not does it produce anything of value. It's an adventure, I suppose, but a shallow ignoble adventure. -- Tom Robbins
Conservatives understand Halloween, liberals only understand Christmas. If you want to control a population, don't give it social services, give it a scary adversary. -- Tom Robbins
Freedom has long proven too heady an elixir for America's masses, weakened and confused as they are by conflicting commitments to puritanical morality and salacious greed. -- Tom Robbins
Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn't bother to wipe its boots. -- Tom Robbins
There is light underwater, even at night, but it is a far cry from the lights that we all know and love... the light by which the reaper reads his list. -- Tom Robbins
Seattle rain smells different from New Orleans rain ... New Orleans rain smells of sulfur and hibiscus, trumpet metal, thunder and sweat. Seattle rain, the widespread rain of the Great Northwest, smells of green ice and sumi ink, of geology and silence and minnow breath. -- Tom Robbins
Sissy Hankshaw once taught a parakeet to hitchhike. -- Tom Robbins
Civilization is a mutant beast that emerged from the shattered egg of primitive stability.-Sissy Hankshaw -- Tom Robbins
There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in domination, and we are all secretly attracted to violence. -- Tom Robbins
How do you know that?" "Maybe I'm a fucking detective, -- Tom Robbins
Despair is ultimately destructive to oneself and a burden to others; and that if one persists in it, the gods will sooner or later lose patience and give one something to really despair about. -- Tom Robbins
Of the Seven Dwarfs, the only one who shaved was Dopey. That should tell us something about the wisdom of shaving. -- Tom Robbins
Sometimes one gets the feeling that life still thinks it's living in Paris in the '30s. -- Tom Robbins
You mean you would have me blow up something just because I didn't approve of it? What do you think I am, a vandal? A fascist? A fucking critic? -- Tom Robbins
People tend to take everything too seriously. Especially themselves. -- Tom Robbins
Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets. -- Tom Robbins
Almost any object, including this book you hold, can turn up as Exhibit A in a murder trial. -- Tom Robbins
Don't be outraged, be outrageous. -- Tom Robbins
What I've learned along the way is that existence is cosmic theatre, but paradoxically, we should play our roles to the absolute best of our ability while having the wisdom not to take them too seriously. -- Tom Robbins
Time brought along its secretary, memory, and space brought its brat, loneliness. -- Tom Robbins
The winter passed as slowly and peacefully as a boa constrictor digesting a valium addict. -- Tom Robbins
To perform without a net is ecstasy." Papa Phom had often reminded her, "To perform without focus is fatal. -- Tom Robbins
Isn't fixity the hallmark of the living dead? -- Tom Robbins
The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being. -- Tom Robbins
I sweet potato what I sweet potato. -- Tom Robbins
There is a sense in which a painted stick is a stick in bloom. This stick points to the hidden face of God. Sometimes it points to you. -- Tom Robbins
Behind that rough facade, customers drank beer and danced, activities that to any good Southern Baptist invoked the Devil himself. -- Tom Robbins
Breath Properly, Stay Curious, and Always Eat Your Beets! -- Tom Robbins
Breathe properly. Stay curious. And eat your beets. -- Tom Robbins
There was a marvelous, dark lyricism in his voice, the kind of defiance that is rooted in deep loneliness. -- Tom Robbins
I like to drink just enough to change the temperature in the brain room. I'll turn to less mainstream substances if I want to rearrange the furniture. -- Tom Robbins
Only the young and the beautiful should be allowed to fuck. -- Tom Robbins
Society in general maintains such a vested interested in its cozy habits and solidified belief systems that it had rather die - or kill - than entertain change. Consider how threatened religious fundamentalists of all faiths remain to this day by science in general and Darwin in particular. -- Tom Robbins
Well, I believe life is a Zen koan, that is, an unsolvable riddle. But the contemplation of that riddle - even though it cannot be solved - is, in itself, transformative. And if the contemplation is of high enough quality, you can merge with the divine. -- Tom Robbins
Evidently, I'd suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book. -- Tom Robbins
Nonetheless, the fiery dreams did fade, and inside rooms made of clay and painted blue, sweeter visions were nourished. -- Tom Robbins
One of the other musicians said that the tambourine is a female due to the fact that it makes a pretty jingle and is designed to be spanked. That is the more recent, patriarchal attitude, I suppose. -- Tom Robbins
I tell you, that switch from B.C. to A.D. must have driven people nuts. I bet more than a few Israelites missed their dental appointments. -- Tom Robbins
If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws. -- Tom Robbins
there are countless ways to live upon this tremendous sphere in mirth and good health, and probably only one way - the industrialized, urbanized, herding way - to live here stupidly, and man has hit upon that one wrong way -- Tom Robbins
Safe guidelines for your conversation. Mr. Wrangle went one step further. He doesn't feel it would be emotionally beneficial - for either one of you - to converse at all. He feels that poignant dialogue will merely make your separation -- Tom Robbins
Religions lead us to believe that the soul is the ultimate family jewel and that in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in their vaults, or at least insure it against fire and theft. They are mistaken. -- Tom Robbins
Enlightened and endarkened. The ultimate. -- Tom Robbins
The scientist keeps the romantic honest, and the romantic keeps the scientist human. -- Tom Robbins
I love hot hand of explosion. I love a breeze perfumed with the devil smell of powder. -- Tom Robbins
Heaven is living in your hopes and Hell is living in your fears. It's up to each individual which one he chooses. -- Tom Robbins
The function of the artist is to provide what life does not. -- Tom Robbins
Under an orchard tree, dropping with cherries, cowgirls lay in the shade. They fed each other fruit. Dark juice dribbled into dimples. Cherry meat stained smiles and nostrils. -- Tom Robbins
Would you complain because a beautiful sunset doesn't have a future or a shooting star a payoff? And why should romance 'lead anywhere'? Passion isn't a path through the woods. Passion is the woods. -- Tom Robbins
Life is hard - if you think it's hard. -- Tom Robbins
Indeed, the first step toward becoming a true outlaw is the refusal to be victimized. -- Tom Robbins
Some folks hide, and some folks seek, and seeking, when it's mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous can be a form of hiding. -- Tom Robbins
Be your own flying saucer! Rescue yourself! -- Tom Robbins
Someone once commented that I have a great thirst for knowledge, to which I replied, What the hell? I'll drink anything. -- Tom Robbins
In East of Eden, John Steinbeck wrote that there's never been a great creative collaboration. When the Beatles first burst on the scene, I thought they were proving him wrong. Later, we learned that Lennon and McCartney had each composed their pop masterpieces separately, individually. So it goes. -- Tom Robbins
Eating a raw oyster is like french kissing a mermaid. -- Tom Robbins
Christians, and some Jews, claim we're in the "end times," but they've been saying this off and on for more than two thousand years. -- Tom Robbins
Above all, have a good time. If you aren't enjoying writing it, you can hardly expect someone else to enjoy reading it. -- Tom Robbins
When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. -- Tom Robbins
The beet must have been out of the ground a week or more, for it had the ashen exterior of a cancer victim. -- Tom Robbins
(a hangover without a head to torment is like a philanthropist without an institution to endow), -- Tom Robbins
Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it. -- Tom Robbins
Since moving to New York, she had been gradually abandoning her old ideas about the nobility of suffering. -- Tom Robbins
Besides, if I am truly immortal, I am my own grandchild, my own descendant, my own dynasty. I am not obliged to live on through what I pass down to others. -- Tom Robbins
What mattered to Abu was the music of the sentence. 'A shadow does not belong to the object that casts it.' To Abu, it was a little poem. And in general, it was the poetics, the music of things that tossed his confetti. -- Tom Robbins
To eliminate the agitation and disappointment of desire, we need but awaken to the fact that we have everything we want and need right now. -- Tom Robbins
When life demands more of people than they demand of life - as is ordinarily the case - what results is a resentment of life almost as deep-seated as the fear of death -- Tom Robbins
People tend the take everything too seriously. Especially themselves. Yep. And that's probably what makes 'em scared and hurt so much of the time. Life is too serious to take that seriously. -- Tom Robbins
I love myself," he said. "But it's unrequited. -- Tom Robbins
Faith is believing in something you know isn't true. -- Tom Robbins
God says, "the check's in the mail. -- Tom Robbins
There's nothing like the word dangerous to generate interest: it's irresistible to young males, scary to most young females. -- Tom Robbins
Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received. -- Tom Robbins
Not naive,' Conch shell had corrected him. 'He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear. -- Tom Robbins
This is not the first time that intimidation by typewriter has caused me to consider the pen. -- Tom Robbins
Of course I'm inconsistent! Only logicians and cretins are consistent! -- Tom Robbins
The only question is how to make love stay. -- Tom Robbins
It's entirely possible to function as a free-thinking individual without succumbing to narcissism. This can be tricky at times, I suppose, but then so can the tango - particularly if you're dancing alone. -- Tom Robbins
Always compare yourself to the best. Even if you never measure up, it can't help but make you better. -- Tom Robbins
Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective. -- Tom Robbins
Whether I'm unduly sensitive to this pain because I'm a princess - could the whole world be the pea under my mattress? - I don't know, but because I'm a princess, I might be able to do something to help lessen humanity's pain. -- Tom Robbins
The moon invented natural rhythm. Civilization uninvented it. -- Tom Robbins
Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice. -- Tom Robbins
There's a certain Buddhistic calm that comes from having ... money in the bank. -- Tom Robbins
In the world according to the positivist, the inspiring thing about scrambled eggs is that any way you turn them they're sunny side up. In the world according to the existentialist, the hopeless thing about scrambled eggs is that any way you turn them they're scrambled. -- Tom Robbins
Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver. -- Tom Robbins
I have always been a romantic, one of those people who believes that a woman in pink circus tights contains all the secrets of the universe. -- Tom Robbins
But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity's a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation. -- Tom Robbins
As any car freak will tell you, the old models are the most beautiful, even if they aren't the most efficient. People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve. -- Tom Robbins
As you know, I've been sick and stupid for a long time. I have a lot to make up for, -- Tom Robbins
The notion of life implies a certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment -- Tom Robbins
To some extent, Seattle remains a frontier metropolis, a place where people can experiment with their lives, and change and grow and make things happen. -- Tom Robbins
Not surprisingly, the socks remain silent, as was their legal right. -- Tom Robbins
Why procrastinate when you can precognitate? -- Tom Robbins
I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man's primary problems aren't political; they're philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It's a cruel, repetitious bore. -- Tom Robbins
In the end what will prevail is your passion not your tale, for love is the Holy Grail. -- Tom Robbins
The ugly may be beautiful, the pretty never. -- Tom Robbins
In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery. -- Tom Robbins
My personal motto has always been: Joy in spite of everything. Not just [mindless] joy, but joy in spite of everything. Recognizing the inequities and the suffering and the corruption and all that but refusing to let it rain on my parade. And I advocate this to other people. -- Tom Robbins
It is what it is. You are what you it. There are no mistakes. -- Tom Robbins
Toys are made in heaven, batteries are made in hell. -- Tom Robbins
April. Spring was on the land like an itch. The whole countryside seemed to be scratching itself awake - lazily, luxuriously, though occasionally scratching so hard its nails hit bone, that old cold calcium that lies beneath our tingles. -- Tom Robbins
We only rise above mediocrity when there's something at stake. p. 174 -- Tom Robbins
So, it was to the pay phone that she descended, bearing the coin of the realm. -- Tom Robbins
Early religions were like muddy ponds with lots of foliage. Concealed there, the fish of the soul could splash and feed. Eventually, however, religions became aquariums. Then hatcheries. From farm fingerling to frozen fish stick is a short swim. -- Tom Robbins
The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy. -- Tom Robbins
I have hitched and hiked over every state and half the nations, through blizzards and under rainbows, in deserts and cities, backward and side-ways, upstairs, downstairs and in my lady's chamber. -- Tom Robbins
The only authority I respect is the one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime. -- Tom Robbins
Switters had always seemed to take a both/and approach to life, as opposed to the more conventional and restrictive either/or. -- Tom Robbins
A sense of humor ... is superior to any religion so far devised. -- Tom Robbins
Usually, autobiography is such an indulgence of the ego. -- Tom Robbins
Are you to be an individual, a trespasser in territory none else has had the wit or nerve to explore, or just another troublesome mosquito to be swatted by the authorities? -- Tom Robbins
Solace? That's why God made fermented beverages and the blues. -- Tom Robbins
What was it like in there? Inside a daisy?" My answer: "Like a cathedral made of mathematics and honey. -- Tom Robbins
Marx Marvelous is going to break the genius machine when he grows up. That's what everyone said. He hasn't, of course. -- Tom Robbins
The concert had energized me in a peculiar and powerful way. It had jimmied the lock on my language box and smashed the last of my literary inhibitions. -- Tom Robbins
Western civilization was declining too fast for comfort, but too slowly to be very exciting. -- Tom Robbins
red hair is caused by sugar and lust. -- Tom Robbins
Don't trust anybody who'd rather be grammatically correct than have a good time. -- Tom Robbins
Purpose! Purposes are for animals with a hell of a lot more dignity than the human race! Just hop on that strange torpedo and ride it to wherever it's going -- Tom Robbins
Among the Haida Indians of the Pacific Northwest, the verb for "making poetry" is the same as the verb "to breathe."
Such tidbits of ethnic lore delighted Amanda, and she vowed from that time onward she would try to regulate each breath as if she were composing a poem. -- Tom Robbins
Individualism is bad for business - though absolutely necessary for freedom, progressive knowledge, and any possible interface with the transcendent. -- Tom Robbins
Transformation, liberation and celebration are the themes of all my novels. -- Tom Robbins
They say that February is the shortest month, but you know they could be wrong. -- Tom Robbins
(Actually, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better. -- Tom Robbins
Fire is the reuniting of matter with oxygen. If one bears that in mind, every blaze may be seen as a reunion, an occasion of chemical joy. -- Tom Robbins
We approach the divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains. -- Tom Robbins
Don't confuse symmetry with balance. -- Tom Robbins
Be careful what goes into your mouth and what comes out of it. -- Tom Robbins
This did not annoy Amanda for it had long been her theory that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another. -- Tom Robbins
I mean that gods do not limit men. Men limit men. -- Tom Robbins
My paintings are very strange - large and empty, like walls. Just the opposite of my writing, which is rich and juicy. -- Tom Robbins
Whatever goes wrong can be used to your advantage, providing it goes wrong enough. -- Tom Robbins
When we can converse with the animals, we will know the change is halfway here. When we can converse with the forest, we will know the change has come. -- Tom Robbins
Authority is to be ridiculed, outwitted and avoided. -- Tom Robbins
One has not only an ability to perceive the world but an ability to alter one's perception of it; more simply, one can change things by the manner in which one looks at them. -- Tom Robbins
There was no wire across in those days, no big house on the other side; nothing but the open yap of the planet, yawning as if bored by the pace of evolution. -- Tom Robbins
Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. -- Tom Robbins
Maybe most people were fundamentally contradictory. The real people at any rate. -- Tom Robbins
It was Jefferson's genius that kept the American Revolution from being sucked into the tunnel faster than it was. Jefferson had red hair. Nothing is implied here. -- Tom Robbins