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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

“I'm looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.”

Tom Robbins Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)

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

Tom Robbins Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976)

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

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

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

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

“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?"”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

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

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

“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…”

Tom Robbins Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)

“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.”

Tom Robbins book Wild Ducks Flying Backward

Wild Ducks Flying Backward (2005)

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

Tom Robbins Skinny Legs and All

Skinny Legs and All (1990)

“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.”

Tom Robbins

The Syntax of Sorcery (2012)

“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.”

Tom Robbins Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)

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

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

“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 book Jitterbug Perfume

Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

“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.”

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

“…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.”

Tom Robbins Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)

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

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

“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.”

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

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

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

“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.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

“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.”

Tom Robbins Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)

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

Tom Robbins

"The Green Man : Tom Robbins" interviewed by Gregory Daurer, in High Times (12 June 2002).
High Times interview (2002)

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

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

“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?”

Tom Robbins Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)

“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.”

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

“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.”

Tom Robbins book Wild Ducks Flying Backward

Wild Ducks Flying Backward (2005)

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

Tom Robbins

Appears in the book The Syntax of Sorcery (2012).

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

Tom Robbins Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

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."
Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)