Tom Robbins Quotes

page 2

“As a child, I was an imaginary playmate.”

“It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful…”

“Breathe properly. Stay curious. And eat your beets.”

“Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Ellen Cherry was from the south and had good manners. She didn´t have any panties on, but she had good manners.”

“We're making it up. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.”

“Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense.”

“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.”

“Growing up is a trap," snapped Dr. Robbins. "When they tell you to shut up, they mean stop talking. When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. Reach a nice level plateau and settle there, predictable and unchanging, no longer a threat.”

“Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.”

“It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful, like the flowers, than large, conservative, repressed, fearful, and aggressive, like the thunder lizards; a lesson, by the way, that the Earth has yet to learn.”

“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?”

“The function of the artist is to provide what life does not.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In the end, we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that's being continually retold in an accent too thick and too strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke. The soul is its punchline.”

“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.”

“Meet me in Cognito, baby. In Cognito, we'll have nothing to hide.”

“If you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropiate port you find yourself docked.”

“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.”

“Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver.”

“red hair is caused by sugar and lust.”

“Often, moreover, it is… that aspect of our being that society finds eccentric, ridiculous, or disagreeable, that holds our sweet waters, our secret well of happiness, the key to our equanimity in malevolent climes.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When we accept small wonders, we qualify ourselves to imagine great wonders.”

“The sky was the color of Edgar Allen Poe's pajamas.”

“Eating a raw oyster is like french kissing a mermaid.”

“"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.”

“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.”

“Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.”

“Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable.”

“Does koala bear poop smell like cough drops?”

“Solace? That's why God made fermented beverages and the blues.”

“All a person can do in this life is gather about him his integrity, his imagination, and his individuality – and with these ever with him, out front and in sharp focus, leap into the dance of experience.”

“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.”

“Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.”

“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.”

“I have always been a romantic; one of those who believes that a woman in pink circus tights holds all the secrets of the world.”

“People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve. (Bernard Mickey Wrangle, p 99)”

“People of zee wurl, Relax!”

“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.”

“Human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.”

“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.”

“There's no point in saving the world if it means losing the moon.”

“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.”