Tom Robbins Quotes

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Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.

Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

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It was one of those mellow October days that seem concocted from a mixture of sage, polished brass and peach brandy.

Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction

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The only authority I respect is the one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime.

Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction

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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.

Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

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Growing up is a trap. 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.

Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

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Oh God, are there so many of them in our land! Students who can’t be happy until they’ve graduated, servicemen who can’t be happy until they are discharged, single folks who can’t be happy until they’ve found a mate, workers who can’t be happy until they’ve retired, adolescents who aren’t happy until they’re grown, ill people who aren’t happy until they’re well, failures who aren’t happy until they succeed, restless who can’t wait until they get out of town, and in most cases, vice versa, people waiting, waiting for the world to begin.

Tom Robbins

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To diminish the worth of women, men had to diminish the worth of the moon. They had to drive a wedge between human beings and the trees and the beasts and the waters, because trees and beasts and waters are as loyal to the moon as to the sun. They had to drive a wedge between thought and feeling...At first they used Apollo as the wedge, and the abstract logic of Apollo made a mighty wedge, indeed, but Apollo the artist maintained a love for women, not the open, unrestrained lust that Pan has, but a controlled longing that undermined the patriarchal ambition. When Christ came along, Christ, who slept with no female...Christ, who played no musical instrument, recited no poetry, and never kicked up his heels by moonlight, this Christ was the perfect wedge. Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses.

Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

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If space is love, Professor, then is love space? Or is love something we use to fill space? If time eats the doughnut, does love eat the hole?

Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

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So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.

Tom Robbins

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How can one person be more real than any other? Well, some people do hide and others seek. Maybe those who are in hiding - escaping encounters, avoiding surprises, protecting their property, ignoring their fantasies, restricting their feelings, sitting out the pan pipe hootchy-kootch of experience - maybe those people, people who won't talk to rednecks, or if they're rednecks won't talk to intellectuals, people who're afraid to get their shoes muddy or their noses wet, afraid to eat what they crave, afraid to drink Mexican water, afraid to bet a long shot to win, afraid to hitchhike, jaywalk, honky-tonk, cogitate, osculate, levitate, rock it, bop it, sock it, or bark at the moon, maybe such people are simply inauthentic, and maybe the jacklet humanist who says differently is due to have his tongue fried on the hot slabs of Liar's Hell. Some folks hide, and some folk's seek, and seeking, when it's mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous can be a form of hiding. But there are folks who want to know and aren't afraid to look and won't turn tail should they find it - and if they never do, they'll have a good time anyway because nothing, neither the terrible truth nor the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of Earth's sweet gas.

Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker

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As the author sees it, the Earth is God’s pinball machine and each quake, tidal wave, flash flood and volcanic eruption is the result of a tilt that occurs when God, cheating, tries to win free games.

Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

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Don't trust anyone who'd rather be grammatically correct than have a good time.

Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

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A sky full of vanilla stars and pastel planets and rushing comets and constellations (Jupiter was in the house of Gemini) and novae and nebulae and meteors dissolving in spittoons of fire and a tropical moon laid out against a cloud bank like a radioactive oyster on the half shell, and dominating the entire sidereal panorama was Saturn--silver and mysterious mushy omelet of ammonia and ice girded by its sharp gas rings like an avatar egg with a hip-hugger aura.

Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction

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Who knows how to make love stay? 1. Tell love you are going to Junior’s Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay. 2. 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 moustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay. 3. 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, Still Life With Woodpecker

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Why do people fear death so? Because they realize, unconsciously at least, that their lives are mere parodies of what living should be. They ache to quit playing at living and to really live, but, alas, it takes time and trouble to piece the loose ends of their lives together and are dogged by the notion that time is running out.

Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

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And then the rains came. They came down from the hills and up from the sound. And it rained a sickness. And it rained a fear. And it rained an odor. And it rained a murder. And it rained dangers and pale eggs of the beast. Rain poured for days, unceasing. Flooding occurred. The wells filled with reptiles. The basements filled with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics roamed the dripping peninsulas. Moisture gleamed on the beak of the raven. Ancient Shaman’s rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clamshell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old warpaths, spilled the huckleberries, ran into the ditches. Soaking. Spreading. Penetrating. And it rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure.

Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction

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It’s the people who have been deformed by society that I feel sorry for. We can live with nature’s experiments, and if they aren’t too vile, turn them to our advantage. But social deformity is sneaky and invisible; it makes people into monsters--or mice.

Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues