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Tom Robbins Quotes
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Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins is an American novelist. His best-selling novels are "seriocomedies" , often wildly poetic stories with a strong social and philosophical undercurrent, an irreverent bent, and scenes extrapolated from carefully researched bizarre facts. His novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was made into a movie in 1993 by Gus Van Sant and stars Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco, and Keanu Reeves.



✵ 22. July 1932  •  Other names تام رابینز, 湯姆·羅賓斯, トム・ロビンズ
Tom Robbins photo
Tom Robbins: 250 quotes15 likes

Tom Robbins Quotes

“Something has got to hold it together. I'm saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

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

Tom Robbins

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

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Source: Jitterbug Perfume

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

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Source: Jitterbug Perfume

“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.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)
Context: 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.

“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 book Jitterbug Perfume

Source: Jitterbug Perfume

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

Tom Robbins Skinny Legs and All

Source: Skinny Legs and All

“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 book Still Life with Woodpecker

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

“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 book Wild Ducks Flying Backward

Source: Wild Ducks Flying Backward

“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.”

Tom Robbins Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Source: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“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.”

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Source: Jitterbug Perfume

“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 Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Source: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“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 Skinny Legs and All

Source: Skinny Legs and All

“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 book Jitterbug Perfume

Source: Jitterbug Perfume

“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 book Jitterbug Perfume

Source: Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

“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.”

Tom Robbins Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)

“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 book Wild Ducks Flying Backward

Source: Wild Ducks Flying Backward

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

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Source: Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

“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

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

Tom Robbins

“red hair is caused by sugar and lust.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker

“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.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker

“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

“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 Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Source: Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

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

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Source: Jitterbug Perfume

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

Tom Robbins

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

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 book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

“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 book Another Roadside Attraction

Source: Another Roadside Attraction

“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.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker

“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

“Does koala bear poop smell like cough drops?”

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Source: Jitterbug Perfume

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

Tom Robbins Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Source: Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

“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.”

Tom Robbins Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Source: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“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 book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker

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

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

“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 Skinny Legs and All

Source: Skinny Legs and All

“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.”

Tom Robbins

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

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker

“People of zee wurl, Relax!”

Tom Robbins Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Source: Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)

“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 book Jitterbug Perfume

Source: Jitterbug Perfume

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

Tom Robbins book Another Roadside Attraction

Source: Another Roadside Attraction

“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 book Jitterbug Perfume

Source: Jitterbug Perfume

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

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker

“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 Skinny Legs and All

Source: Skinny Legs and All