Tom Robbins Quotes

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“Sometimes those things that attract the most attention to us are the things that afford us the greatest privacy.”

“The man and woman firmly shook hands. The solution to the overpopulation problem might rest in such handshakes.”

“Modern Romans insisted that there was only one god, a notion that struck Alobar as comically simplistic.”

“Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning or an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that question is: "Who knows how to make love stay?"”

“He looked at her with that kind of painted-on seriousness that comedians shift into when they get their chance to play Hamlet.”

“You can love ‘em till your well runs dry, Belford, but you can never love ‘em enough, and you know it. No matter how much others might love you, you can’t love yourself unless you’re in charge of your own actions, and you’ll never take charge as long as you can get away with blaming your shortcomings and misfortunes on your family or society or your race or gender or Satan or whatever…”

“All animals copulate but only humans osculate. Parakeets rub beaks? Sure they do, but only little old ladies who murder schoolchildren with knitting needles to steal their lunch money so that they can buy fresh kidneys to feed overweight kitty cats would place bird billing in the realm of the true kiss.”

“Not naive," Conch Shell had corrected him, "He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear.”

“Watts published a luminous book entitled The Wisdom of Insecurity that ought to be required reading for every high school senior. Watts elaborates beautifully on what I've learned from observation and personal experience: namely, that security is an illusion.”

“Moreover, given the unpleasant option of having to associate with either the self-satisfied beautiful or the self-pitying plain, he'd choose the former every time because beauty could sometimes transcend smugness whereas self-pity just made ugliness all the more unattractive.”

“Of the seven deadly sins, lust is definitely the pick of the litter.”

“Let me see if I can put it in words that even the inebriated might understand.”

“You don't have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House.”

“I deserve to be chained by night in a church basement without company o' cassette player if I'm not man enough to ask you for the teeniest, slightest brush of oral-muscular affaction.”

“…that she was the one who'd made friends with the Snake, that she'd let it lick the blood of her first menstruation, that she … ooo eee, that she … ooo eee, that she … ooo, eee, that she now knew what the Serpent knew.”

“Above the building, the sky recalled passages from Les Miserables, threadbare and gray.”

“Zippers are primal and modern at the very same time. On the one hand, your zipper is primitive and reptilian, on the other, mechanical and slick. A zipper is where the Industrial Revolution meets the Cobra Cult.”

“I sense that novel of my dreams is in the Remington SL3 — although it writes much faster than I can spell.”

“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. It will stay. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.”

“Your friend insults the homeless by giving them no credit for having made the decisions that shaped their lives, and demeans them further by declaring them powerless to alter their situations. There’re many ways, my dear, to victimize people. The most insidious way is to persuade them that they’re victims.”

“The key to self-generated happiness (the only reliable kind) is the refusal to take oneself too seriously.”

“A lot of progress was being made there at MIT. Those guys had molecules jumping through hoops like poodles in a circus.”

“What is it that separates human beings from the so called lower animals? Well as I see it, it's exactly one half dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism — as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glow-worms or raccoons — Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake. Now, since those are the features that define a human being, it follows that the extent to which someone is lacking in those qualities is the extent to which he or she is less than human. Capisce?”

“If you didn't serve the nasty fellow (God), the Romans would burn your house down. If you did serve him, you were called a Christian and got to burn other people's houses down.”

“To pragmatists, the letter Z is nothing more than a phonetically symbolic glyph, a minor sign easily learned, readily assimilated, and occasionally deployed in the course of a literate life. To cynics, Z is just an S with a stick up its butt.”

“A better world has gotta start somewhere. Why not with you and me?”

“Just because something didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't true.”

“The Devil doesn't make us do anything.”