Tom Robbins citations

Page 7

“Accept that you're a pimple and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way lies grace — and maybe even glory.”

“The shaman lives outside the social system, refusing to have any part of it. Yet he seems to connect the populace to the heavens and the earth far more directly than the priest.”

“There are landscapes in which we feel above us not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed, is seen, although in such settings the sky is invariably immense. There is a place between the cerebrum and the stars where sky stops and space commenses, and should we find ourselves on a particular prairie or mountaintop at a particular hour […] our relationship with sky thins and loosens while our connection with space becomes as solid as bone.”

“She tried out the chamber pot, although she really had nothing to contribute.”

“There's probably no subject with quite so many conflictin' opinions about it as there are about food, and 'tis better to swap bubble gum with a rabid bulldog than challenge a single one o' the varyin' beliefs your average human holds about nutrition.”

“She lunched on papaya poo poo or mango mu mu or some other fruity foo foo bursting with overripe tropical vowels.”

“This baby (the Remington SL3 typewriter) speaks electric Shakespeare at the slightest provocation and will rap out a page and a half if you just look at it hard.”

“In this room, the salamander was squashed between the pages of the rhyming dictionary, thereby changing poetry forever. Here, Salome walked around with a big red fish held high up over her head. Old Father spanked her with a ballet slipper, sending her to bed without milk or honey. Dance was changed in this room, too.”

“The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.”

“It's a smile a girl could bring home to mother, if she had a mother; a smile a girl could pet like a pony, sip like a lemonade, hum like a popular tune; a smile a girl would feel safe with in a dark alley.”

“They were old enough to know better. Some of them were old enough to remember when old Macdonald had a farm.”

“I journey to the east, where I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners.”

“Midnight, when the monotonous tick-tock of diurnal progress is for one throbbing moment replaced by the cool but smokey honk of a saxophone, alternately seductive and threatening. Midnight. The black growth on the clock face that has to be biopsied every twenty-four hours to see whether it is malignant or benign.”

“Night, when tangos play on the nurse's radio and rat poison sings its own hot song behind the cellar door. Night, when the long snake feeds, when the black sedan cruises the pleasure districts, when neon flickers "Free at Last" in a dozen lost languages, and shapes left over from childhood move furtively behind the moon-dizzy boughs of the fir.”

“The only meat in the world sweeter, hotter, and pinker than Amanda's twat is Carolina barbecue.”

“Her surname resembled a line from an optometrist's examination chart.”

“A person can't make a career out of somebody else's invective.”

“It is so amusing the way that mortals misunderstand the shape, or shapes, of time. … In the realms of the ultimate, each person must figure out things for themselves. … Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.”

“Good luck to you, pal. That's a search these days.”

“Hawaii made the mouth of her soul water.”

“Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.”

“So this, then, is the chamber of the hootchy-kootch. Its bathtub full of orchids. Its closet full of smoke.”

“In the quiet ache of the evening, Alobar listened to his calluses grow.”

“Twenty candles on a cake. Twenty Camels in a pack. Twenty months in the federal pen. Twenty shots of tequila down a young girl's gullet. Twenty centuries since Our Lord's last pratfall, and after all that time we still don't know where passion goes when it goes.”

“It couldn't have been Pan's output alone because Alobar's testicles were as flat and juiceless as trampled grapes.”

“This stuff's so fine Julius Caesar called for it with his dying breath. 'A toot, Brutus,' is what he said.”

“The first time that she spread her legs for him it had been like opening her jaws for the dentist.”

“There is a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like a part of the act.”

“Any half-awake materialist well knows — that which you hold holds you.”