Tom Robbins citations

Page 3

“I believe in everything; nothing is sacred. I believe in nothing; everything is sacred. Ha Ha Ho Ho Hee Hee.”

“But do we know how to make love stay?'
I can't even think about it. The best I can do is play it day by day.”

“Death is simple. Life is messy. Give me life, the more complicated the better.”

“You're better equipped for this world than I am," she said. "I'm always trying to change the world. You know how to live in it.”

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

“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.”