Tom Robbins: Trending quotes (page 11)

“Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.”

“So this, then, is the chamber of the hootchy-kootch. Its bathtub full of orchids. Its closet full of smoke.”

“In the quiet ache of the evening, Alobar listened to his calluses grow.”

“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.”

“It couldn't have been Pan's output alone because Alobar's testicles were as flat and juiceless as trampled grapes.”

“This stuff's so fine Julius Caesar called for it with his dying breath. 'A toot, Brutus,' is what he said.”

“The first time that she spread her legs for him it had been like opening her jaws for the dentist.”

“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.”

“Any half-awake materialist well knows — that which you hold holds you.”

“Of course I'm inconsistent! Only logicians and cretins are consistent!”

“Tequila, scorpion honey, harsh dew of the doglands, essence of Aztec, crema de cacti; tequila, oily and thermal like the sun in solution; tequila, liquid geometry of passion; Tequila, the buzzard God who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying virgins; tequila, firebug in the house of good taste; O tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate!”

“My lunar sign is in Virgo. Every month when the moon is full, I'm driven to balance my checkbook and straighten up my apartment. I can't help myself. Instead of a werewolf I turn into an accountant.”

“Genius may stand on the shoulders of giants, but it stands alone.”

“What we, thanks to Jung, call "synchronicity" (coincidence on steroids), Buddhists have long known as "the interpenetration of realities." Whether it's a natural law of sorts or simply evidence of mathematical inevitability (an infinite number of monkeys locked up with an infinite number of typewriters eventually producing Hamlet, not to mention Tarzan of the Apes), it seems to be as real as it is eerie.”

“I've always assumed that every time a child is born, the Divine reenters the world. Okay? That's the meaning of the Christmas story. And every time that child's purity is corrupted by society, that's the meaning of the Crucifixion story. Your man Jesus stands for that child, that pure spirit, and as its surrogate, he's being born and put to death again and again, over and over, every time we inhale and exhale, not just at the vernal equinox and on the twenty-fifth of December.”

“Sharks are the criminals of the sea. Dolphins are the outlaws.”

“A rabbi's dog could score pork chops in the streets of Tel Aviv easier than Bernard could acquire tequila in King County Jail.”

“Water! Of all liquids on Earth, the only one chosen for scrubbin' and flushin'. The liquid they rinse baby's nappies in, the fluid that floods the gutters o' this cloud-squeezer town; a single drop o' water discolors a glass of Irish, and you, false friend, are wantin' me to pour this abrasive substance into me defenseless body!”

“The winter passed as slowly and peacefully as a boa constrictor digesting a valium addict.”