Quotes from book
Still Life with Woodpecker

Name: Still Life with Woodpecker
Author: Tom Robbins

Still Life With Woodpecker is the third novel by Tom Robbins, concerning the love affair between an environmentalist princess and an outlaw. The novel encompasses a broad range of topics, from aliens and redheads to consumerism, the building of bombs, romance, royalty, the Moon, and a pack of Camel cigarettes. The novel continuously addresses the question of "how to make love stay" and is sometimes referred to as "a post-modern fairy tale".

“There are essential and inessential insanities. The latter are solar in character, the former are linked to the moon.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

“It's never too late to have a happy childhood.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

“The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Leigh-Cheri to Bernard, in Phase III, Ch. 46.
Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)
Context: I’m not quite twenty, but, thanks to you, I’ve learned something that many women these days never learn: Prince Charming really is a toad. And the Beautiful Princess has halitosis. The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love. Wouldn’t that be the way to make love stay?

“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

“Nobody quite knew what to make of the moon any more.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker

“Brilliantly, ecstatically, irrepressibly. This is the way to burn”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)
Context: "This is the way to burn," the fuse seemed to be saying to the more docile, slow-witted candlewick. "Brilliantly, ecstatically, irrepressibly. This is the way to burn."

“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.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker

“I'll bet I'm as old as you are."
"I'm older than Sanskrit."
"Well, I was waitress at the Last Supper."
"I'm so old I remember when McDonald's had only sold a hundred burgers."
"You win.”

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)

“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

“Poetry, the best of it, is lunar and is concerned with the essential insanities. Journalism is solar (there are numerous newspapers named The Sun, none called The Moon) and is devoted to the inessential.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker

“There are only two mantras… yum and yuk. Mine is yum.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Phase II, Ch. 21.
Source: Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

“"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)

“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.

“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

“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

“Outlaws, like lovers, poets, and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker

“People are never perfect, but love can be.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker