Tom Robbins quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Tom Robbins has a lot to say. In this list we present the 168 best Tom Robbins quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
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Tom Robbins quotes
We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.
— Tom Robbins
The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words “make” and “stay” become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.
— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
When two people meet and fall in love, there’s a sudden rush of magic. Magic is just naturally present then. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more. One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone. We hustle to get it back, but by then it’s usually too late, we’ve used it up. What we have to do is work like hell at making additional magic right from the start. It’s hard work, but if we can remember to do it, we greatly improve our chances of making love stay.
— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
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
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 and an end.Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm.There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay?Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself.
— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be trusted, but love does work; all things are possible; and we all could be happy and fulfilled if we only had the guts to be truly free and the wisdom to shrink our egos and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously.
— Tom Robbins
There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it in, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life’s bittersweet route.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn’t creak.
— Tom Robbins
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.
— Tom Robbins, Wild Ducks Flying Backward
Often, moreover, it is…that aspect of our being that society finds eccentric, ridiculous, or disagreeable, that holds our sweet waters, our secret well of happiness, the key to our equanimity in malevolent climes.
— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
…disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business….
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.
— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man’s primary problems aren’t political; they’re philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they’re condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It’s a cruel, repetitious bore.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Faith is believing in something you know isn’t true.
— Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
Reality is subjective, and there’s an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as ‘important’ only if ‘tis sober and severe. Sure and still you’re right about your Cheerful Dum, only they’re not so much happy as lobotomized. But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous. When you’re unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don’t think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin’ on himself and start payin’ attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form o’ self-indulgence.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Suppose neutral angels were able to talk, Yahweh and Lucifer – God and Satan, to use their popular titles – into settling out of court. What would be the terms of the compromise? Specifically, how would they divide the assets of their early kingdom?Would God be satisfied the loaves and fishes and itty-bitty thimbles of Communion wine, while Satan to have the red-eye gravy, eighteen-ounce New York Stakes, and buckets of chilled champagne? Would God really accept twice-a-month lovemaking for procreative purposes and give Satan the all night, no-holds-barred, nasty “can’t-get-enough-of-you” hot-as-hell-fucks?Think about it. Would Satan get New Orleans, Bangkok, and the French Riviera and God get Salt Lake City? Satan get ice hockey, God get horseshoes? God get bingo, Satan get stud poker? Satan get LSD; God, Prozac? God get Neil Simon; Satan Oscar Wilde?
— Tom Robbins
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
Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good. Moreover, a lout thrashing about in the clear waters of wisdom will dirty those waters for everyone else.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
When you’re unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don’t think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin’ on himself and start payin’ attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
It is more important to be free than to be happy.
— Tom Robbins
It’s more important to be free than to be happy.
— Tom Robbins, Il fungo magico
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.
— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death.
— Tom Robbins
He was becoming unstuck, he was sure of that – his bones were no longer wrapped in flesh but in clouds of dust, in hummingbirds, dragonflies, and luminous moths – but so perfect was his equilibrium that he felt no fear. He was vast, he was many, he was dynamic, he was eternal.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Bones are patient. Bones never tire nor do they run away. When you come upon a man who has been dead many years, his bones will still be lying there, in place, content, patiently waiting, but his flesh will have gotten up and left him. Water is like flesh. Water will not stand still. It is always off to somewhere else; restless, talkative, and curious. Even water in a covered jar will disappear in time. Flesh is water. Stones are like bones. Satisfied. Patient. Dependable. Tell me, then, Alobar, in order to achieve immortality, should you emulate water or stone? Should you trust your flesh or your bones?
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn’t bother to wipe its boots.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
It seems like with you everything leads back to the subject of death.””Sure and show me the person’s road that does not lead to death. we try to divert our attention, to pretend ’tisn’t so, but the very air we breathe is vulture’s breath. Please don’t be insinuatin’ your man is morbid. I dwell on death in order to defeat it.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done.
— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obscured the already vague circumstances of its origins.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Rules such as “Write what you know, ” and “Show, don’t tell, ” while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.
— Tom Robbins
Sounds travel through space long after their wave patterns have ceased to be detectable by the human ear: some cut right through the ionosphere and barrel on out into the cosmic heartland, while others bounce around, eventually being absorbed into the vibratory fields of earthly barriers, but in neither case does the energy succumb; it goes on forever – which is why we, each of us, should take pains to make sweet notes.
— Tom Robbins
The word desire suggests that there is something we do not have. If we have everything already, then there can be no desire, for there is nothing left to want. I think that what the Buddha may have been trying to tell us is that we have it all, each of us, all the time; therefore, desire is simply unnecessary.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
As long as a population can be induced to believe in a supernatural hereafter, it can be oppressed and controlled. People will put up with all sorts of tyranny, poverty, and painful treatment if they’re convinced that they’ll eventually escape to some resort in the sky where lifeguards are superfluous and the pool never closes. Moreover, the faithful are usually willing to risk their skins in whatever military adventure their government may currently be promoting.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
salvation is for the feeble, that’s what I think. I don’t want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
After the monkeys came down from the trees and learned to hurl sharp objects, they had had to move into caves for protection–not only from the big predatory cats but, as they began to lose their monkey fur, from the elements. Eventually, they started transposing their hunting fantasies onto cave walls in the form of pictures, first as an attempt at practical magic and later for the strange, unexpected pleasure they discovered in artistic creation. Time passed. Art came off the walls and turned into ritual. Ritual became religion. Religion spawned science. Science led to big business. And big business, if it continues on its present mindless, voracious trajectory, could land those of us lucky enough to survive its ultimate legacy back into caves again.
— Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito
Soul is not even that Crackerjack prize that God and Satan scuffle over after the worms have all licked our bones. That’s why, when we ponder–as sooner or later each of us must–exactly what we ought to be doing about our soul, religion is the wrong, if conventional, place to turn. Religion is little more than a transaction in which troubled people trade their souls for temporary and wholly illusionary psychological comfort–the old give-it-up-in-order-to-save-it routine. Religions lead us to believe that the soul is the ultimate family jewel and that in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in their vaults, or at least insure it against fire theft. They are mistaken.
— Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito
Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
Modern Romans insisted that there was only one god, a notion that struck Alobar as comically simplistic. Worse, this Semitic deity was reputed to be jealous (what was there to be jealous of if there were no other gods?), vindictive, and altogether foul-tempered. If you didn’t serve the nasty fellow, 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, Jitterbug Perfume
You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
It is questionable, for that matter, whether success is an adequate response to life. Success can eliminate as many options as failure.
— Tom Robbins
When we’re incomplete, we’re always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we’re still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on–series polygamy–until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.
— Tom Robbins
The protagonist, Amanda, discusses her sex relationship with her husband, John Paul –As long as it’s done with honesty and grace, John Paul doesn’t mind if I go to bed with other men. Or with other girls, as is sometimes my fancy. What has marriage got to do with it? Marriage is not a synonym for monogamy any more than monogamy is a synonym for ideal love. To live lightly on the earth, lovers and families must be more flexible and relaxed. The ritual of sex releases its magic inside or outside the marital bond. I approach that ritual with as much humility as possible and perform it whenever it seems appropriate. As for John Paul and me, a strange spurt of semen is not going to wash our love away.
— Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
The trouble with you is that the only way you can communicate is through art. You’ve never learned to communicate your feelings to a man. You don’t even want to communicate in a relationship. You think that if you open up to love, you’ll lose your independence or your self-expression or creativity or whatever you call all that passionate, wonderful stuff that makes you feel alive inside.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
Information about time cannot be imparted in a straightforward way. Like furniture, it has to be tipped and tilted to get it through the door. If the past is a solid oak buffet whose legs must be unscrewed and whose drawers must be removed before, in an altered state, it can be upended into the entryway of our minds, then the future is a king-size waterbed that hardly stands a chance, especially if it needs to be brought up in an elevator.Those billions who persist in perceiving time as the pursuit of the future are continually buying waterbeds that will never make it beyond the front porch or the lobby. And if man’s mission is to reside in the fullness of the present, then he’s got no space for the waterbed, anyhow, not even if he could lower it through a skylight.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
If New Orleans is not fully in the mainstream of culture, neither is it fully in the mainstream of time. Lacking a well-defined present, it lives somewhere between its past and its future, as if uncertain whether to advance or to retreat. Perhaps it is its perpetual ambivalence that is its secret charm. Somewhere between Preservation Hall and the Superdome, between voodoo and cybernetics, New Orleans listens eagerly to the seductive promises of the future but keeps at least one foot firmly planted in its history, and in the end, conforms, like an artist, not to the world but to its own inner being–ever mindful of its personal style.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
You knows dat in New Orleans is not morning ’til dee sun come up.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Now and again, one could detect in a childless woman of a certain age the various characteristics of all the children she had never issued. Her body was haunted by the ghost of souls who hadn’t lived yet. Premature ghosts. Half-ghosts. X’s without Y’s. Y’s without X’s. They applied at her womb and were denied, but, meant for her and no one else, they wouldn’t go away. Like tiny ectoplasmic gophers, they hunkered in her tear ducts. They shone through her sighs. Often to her chagrin, they would soften the voice she used in the marketplace. When she spilled wine, it was their playful antics that jostled the glass. They called out her name in the bath or when she passed real children in the street. The spirit babies were everywhere her companions, and everywhere they left her lonesome – yet they no more bore her resentment than a seed resents uneaten fruit. Like pet gnats, like phosphorescence, like sighs on a string, they would follow her into eternity.
— Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let’s not kid ourselves – all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermingling of cultures unheard of in any other American city, South or North; although there has prevailed a most joyous and fascinating interface, black anger and white fear has persisted, providing the ongoing, ostensibly integrated fete champetre with volatile and sometimes violent idiosyncrasies.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in domination, and we are all secretly attracted to violence.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
No. No, it was a lonely writer I met one stormy day in Laguna Beach. He had a poem about Thelonious Monk that he sealed in a tin can and labeled Campbell’s Cream of Piano Soup. Later I hear he killed himself to avoid the draft.
— Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
You know what I mean? Real and unreal, beautiful and strange, like a dream. It got me high as a kite, but it didn’t last long enough. It ended too soon and left nothing behind.”That’s how it is with dreams, ” said Priscilla. “They’re the perfect crime.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Perhaps that is why desire causes men calamity. By identifying with our desires and taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of those desires.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
All dreams continue in the beyond.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
If every time we choose a turd, society, at a great expense, simply allows us to redeem it for a pepperoni, then not only will we never learn to make smart choices, we will also surrender the freedom to choose, because a choice without consequences is no choice at all.
— Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
The clown is a creature of chaos. His appearance is an affront to our sense of dignity, his actions a mockery of our sense of order. The clown (freedom) is always being chased by the policeman (authority). Clowns are funny precisely because their shy hopes lead invariably to brief flings of (exhilarating?) disorder followed by crushing retaliation from the status quo. It delights us to watch a careless clown break taboos; it thrills us vicariously to watch him run wild and free; it reassures us to see him slapped down and order restored. After all, we can condone liberty only up to a point. Consider Jesus as a ragged, nonconforming clown–laughed at, persecuted and despised–playing out the dumb show at his crucifixion against the responsible pretensions of authority.
— Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
They accepted my donation, so they’re aware they’d better serve my interests or I’ll buy some leadership that will.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Conversation between a princess and an outlaw: “If I stand for fairy-tale balls and dragon bait–dragon bait–what do you stand for?””Me? I stand for uncertainty, insecurity, bad taste, fun, and things that go boom in the night.””Franky, it seems to me that you’ve turned yourself into a stereotype.””You may be right. I don’t care. As any car freak will tell you, the old models are the most beautiful, even if they aren’t the most efficient. People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve.””Well, you may get off on being a beautiful stereotype, regardless of the social consequences, but my conscience won’t allow it.” “And I goddamn refuse to be dragon bait. I’m as capable of rescuing you as you are of rescuing me.””I’m an outlaw, not a hero. I never intended to rescue you. We’re our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they’re born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mocking birds aren’t content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that serve no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that’s only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we’re all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
Boomer had asked her once, in a telephone call from Virginia, “Why does this stuff, these hand-painted hallucinations that don’t do nothin’ but confuse the puddin’ out of a perfectly reasonable wall, why does it mean so much to you?” It was a poor connection, but he could have sworn he heard her say, “In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn’t creak.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.
— Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
— Tom Robbins
The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
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
A sausage is an image of rest, peace and tranquility in stark contrast to the destruction and chaos of everyday life.
— Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
Some marriages are made in heaven, Mine was made in Hong Kong, by the same people who make those little rubber pork chops they sell in the pet department at Kmart.
— Tom Robbins
Whenever a state or an individual cited ‘insufficient funds’ as an excuse for neglecting this important thing or that, it was indicative of the extent to which reality had been distorted by the abstract lens of wealth. During periods of so-called economic depression, for example, societies suffered for want of all manner of essential goods, yet investigation almost invariably disclosed that there were plenty of goods available. Plenty of coal in the ground, corn in the fields, wool on the sheep. What was missing was not materials but an abstract unit of measurement called ‘money.’ It was akin to a starving woman with a sweet tooth lamenting that she couldn’t bake a cake because she didn’t have any ounces. She had butter, flour, eggs, milk, and sugar, she just didn’t have any ounces, any pinches, any pints. The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
That’s the way the mind works: the brain is genetically disposed towards organization, yet if not controlled, will link even the most imagerial fragment to another on the flimsiest pretense and in the most freewheeling manner, as if it takes a kind of organic pleasure in creative association, without regards to logic or chronological sequence.
— Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
…he glanced over his shoulder at her, regarding her, as he often did before they made love, as if she were a lost continent about to be rediscovered.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.
— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
It is as if the soul of the continent is weeping. Why does it weep? It weeps for the bones of the buffalo. It weeps for magic that has been forgotten. It weeps for the decline of poets.It weepsfor the black people who think like white people.It weepsfor the Indians who think like settlers.It weepsfor the children who think like adults.It weepsfor the free who think like prisoners.Most of all, it weepsfor the cowgirls who think like cowboys.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
If kissing is man’s greatest invention, then fermentation and patriarchy compete with the domestication of animals for the distinction of being man’s worst folly, and no doubt the three combined long ago, the one growing out of the others, to foster civilization and lead Western humanity to its present state of decline.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
If little else, the brain is an educational toy.The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometime they’d rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don’t play some people’s game, they say that you have “lost your marbles, ” not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.
— Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
Evidently, I’d suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.
— Tom Robbins, Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life
There was no burger so soggy that he would not eat it. No tequila so mean that he would not drink it. No car so covered with birdshit and rust that he would not drive it around town (and if it were a convertible, he’d have the top down, even in rain, even in snow). There was no flag he would not desecrate, no true believer he would not mock, no song he wouldn’t sign off-key, no dental appointment he wouldn’t break, no child he wouldn’t do tricks for, no old person he wouldn’t help in from the cold, no moon he wouldn’t lie under…
— Tom Robbins
Meditation, ” said his teacher, “hasn’t got a damn thing to do with anything, ‘cause all it has to do with is nothing. Nothingness. Okay? It doesn’t develop the mind, it dissolves the mind. Self-improvement? Forget it, baby. It erases the self. Throws the ego out on its big brittle ass. What good is it? Good for nothing. Excellent for nothing. Yes, Lord, but when you get down to nothing, you get down to ultimate reality. It’s then and exactly then that you’re sensing the true nature of the universe, you’re linked up with the absolute Absolute, son, and unless you’re content with blowing smoke up your butt all your life, that there’s the only place to be.
— Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
If I have been given any gift in this life, it’s my ability to live simultaneously in the rational world and the world of imagination.
— Tom Robbins, Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life
Of the Seven Dwarfs, the only one who shaved was Dopey. That should tell us something about the wisdom of shaving.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
The highest men are calm, silent and unknown…The true masters seldom reveal themselves, except in the vibrations the leave behind, and upon which the lesser gurus build their doctrines.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it andpush it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm ofmagic.
— Tom Robbins
Logic only gives man what he needs, ” he stammered. “Magic gives him what he wants.
— Tom Robbins
Science gives man what he needs.But magic gives him what he wants.
— Tom Robbins
The longer Ellen Cherry thought about it, the more convinced she became that the mission of the artist in an overtechnologized, overmasculinized society was to call the old magic back to life.Could it be done? Yeah, you pessimistic wimps, it could. Could she do it? Probably not, but she could give it a whirl.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
There was a marvelous, dark lyricism in his voice, the kind of defiance that is rooted in deep loneliness.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It’s no coincidence we call them ‘deadlines.
— Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
In addition, Dr. Dannyboy has suggested a fifth element: positive thinking. Pointing out that their breathing, bathing, dining and screwing brought Alobar and Kudra much physical pleasure, and that an organism steeped in pleasure is an organism disposed to continue, he has said that the will to live cannot be overestimated as a stimulant to longevity. Indeed Dr. Dannyboy goes so far as to claim that ninety percent of all deaths are suicides. Persons, says Wiggs, who lack curiosity about life, who find minimal joy in existence, are all too willing, subconsciously, to cooperate with- and attract- disease, accident and violence.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Success can eliminate as many options as failure
— Tom Robbins
Very well. He’d lighten up. As a matter of fact, he felt as light as the bubbly froth that flew from the lips of the waves. Whatever else his long, unprecedented life might have been, it had been fun. Fun! If others should find that appraisal shallow, frivolous, so be it. To him, it seemed now to largely have been some form of play. And he vowed that in the future he would strive to keep that sense of play more in mind, for he’d grown convinced that play–more than piety, more than charity or vigilance–was what allowed human beings to transcend evil.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
There is no such thing as a weird human being, It’s just that some people require more understanding than others.
— Tom Robbins
The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
The minute you land in New Orleans, something wet and dark leaps on you and starts humping you like a swamp dog in heat, and the only way to get that aspect of New Orleans off you is to eat it off. That means beignets and crayfish bisque and jambalaya, it means shrimp remoulade, pecan pie, and red beans with rice, it means elegant pompano au papillote, funky file z’herbes, and raw oysters by the dozen, it means grillades for breakfast, a po’ boy with chowchow at bedtime, and tubs of gumbo in between. It is not unusual for a visitor to the city to gain fifteen pounds in a week–yet the alternative is a whole lot worse. If you don’t eat day and night, if you don’t constantly funnel the indigenous flavors into your bloodstream, then the mystery beast will go right on humping you, and you will feel its sordid presence rubbing against you long after you have left town. In fact, like any sex offender, it can leave permanent psychological scars.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe- and go on about our tasks
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
Anarchy is like custard cooking over a flame; it has to be constantly stirred or it sticks and gets heavy, like government.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Since when has leadership been a criterion for sanity? Or vice versa. Hitler was a gifted leader, even Nixon. Exhibit leadership qualities as an adolescent, they pack you off to law school for an anus transplant. If it takes, you go into government.
— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
Hawaii once had a rat problem. Then, somebody hit upon a brilliant solution. import mongooses from India. Mongooses would kill the rats. It worked. Mongooses did kill the rats. Mongooses also killed chickens, young pigs, birds, cats, dogs, and small children. There have been reports of mongooses attacking motorbikes, power lawn mowers, golf carts, and James Michener. in Hawaii now, there are as many mongooses as there once were rats. Hawaii had traded its rat problem for a mongoose problem. Hawaii was determined nothing like that would ever happen again.How could Leigh-Cheri draw for Gulietta the appropriate analogy between Hawaii’s rodents and society at large? Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.
— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
Humans have evolved to their relatively high state by retaining the immature characteristics of their ancestors. Humans are the most advanced of mammals – although a case could be made for the dolphins – because they seldom grow up. Behavioral traits such as curiosity about the world, flexibility of response, and playfulness are common to practically all young mammals but are usually rapidly lost with the onset of maturity in all but humans. Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
It’s a privilege to love someone, to truly love them; and while it’s paradisaical if she or he loves you back, it’s unfair to demand or expect reciprocity. We should consider ourselves luck, honored, blessed that we possess the capacity to feel tenderness of such magnitude and be grateful even when that love is not returned. Love is the only game in which we win even when we lose.
— Tom Robbins, Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life
Is that man’s fate: to spend his closest hours to truth longing for a lie?
— Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best. They might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn’t follow you home and park your car.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
A person’s looking for a simple truth to live by, there it is. CHOICE. To refuse to passively accept what we’ve been handed by nature or society, but to choose for ourselves. CHOICE. That’s the difference between emptiness and substance, between a life actually lived and a wimpy shadow cast on an office wall.
— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere – the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Look, America is no more a democracy than Russia is a Communist state. The governments of the U.S. and Russia are practically the same. There’s only a difference of degree. We both have the same basic form of government: economic totalitarianism. In other words, the settlement to all questions, the solutions to all issues are determined not by what will make the people most healthy and happy in the bodies and their minds but by economics. Dollars or rubles. Economy uber alles. Let nothing interfere with economic growth, even though that growth is castrating truth, poisoning beauty, turning a continent into a shit-heap and riving an entire civilization insane. Don’t spill the Coca-Cola, boys, and keep those monthly payments coming.
— Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
There were no mail-order catalogues in 1492. Marco Polo’s journal was the wish book of Renaissance Europe. Then, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and landed in Sears’ basement. Despite all the Indians on the escalator, Columbus’ visit came to be known as a “discovery.
— Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
Although the surface of our planet is two-thirds water, we call it the Earth. We say we are earthlings, not waterlings. Our blood is closer to seawater than our bones to soil, but that’s no matter. The sea is the cradle we all rocked out of, but it’s to dust that we go. From the time that water invented us, we began to seek out dirt. The further we separate ourselves from the dirt, the further we separate ourselves from ourselves. Alienation is a disease of the unsoiled.
— Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
That’s the value of the artist… Even when they aren’t aware, they’re dreaming our dreams for us.
— Tom Robbins, Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life
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.
— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
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.― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
— Tom Robbins
One tended to lose one’s bearings in the presence of willful and persistent acts of craziness, and the more gentle the act, the crazier it seemed, as if rage and violence, being closer to the norm, were easier to accommodate.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
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 itself is invariably immense. There is a place between the cerebrum and the stars where sky stops and space commences, 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 to space becomes solid as bone.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity’s a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation.
— Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective.
— Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings–artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers–to create order. In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery. To relive the repression of the human spirit, they must sow doubt and disruption.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
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.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
Purpose! Purposes are for animals with a hell of a lot more dignity than the human race! Just hop on that strange torpedo and ride it to wherever it’s going
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.
— Tom Robbins
Our society gives its economy priority over health, love, truth, beauty, sex and salvation; over life itself. Whatsoever is given precedence over life will take precedence over life, and will end in eliminating life. Since economics, at its most abstract level, is the religion of our people, no noneconomic happening, not even one as potentially spectacular as the Second Coming, can radically alter the souls of our people.
— Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
Jerusalem was capital of southern Israel, known then as Judah. Isn’t it true that there’s always a rivalry between north and south? North and South Korea, North and South Vietnam, Northern and Southern Ireland, Yankees and Rebels, uptown and downtown. Somebody please tell me why that is? Maybe southerners get too much sun, like Mr. Sock over there, frying his threads, and northerners don’t get enough (although I hardly think northern Israel a cool spot in the shade), but southern peoples–tropical and downtown types–always seem to lean toward decadence, whereas uptown, in the north, progress is favored. Decadence and progress obviously are at odds.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
For the ethical, political activism was seductive because it seemed to offer the possibility that one could improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one’s perceptions and transforming one’s self. For the unconscionable, political reactivism was seductive because it seemed to protect one’s holdings and legitimize one’s greed. But both sides were gazing through a kerchief of illusion.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
Cries for help are frequently inaudible.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
the greatest men that ever live pass away unknown. they put forth no claims for themselves, establish no schools of systems in their name. they never create or stir but just melt down into love
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
If you want your tree to produce plenty o’ fruit, you’ve got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin’.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
There’s no point in saving the world if it means losing the moon.
— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the Sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realised its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
If being alive is not a virtue, then there is little virtue in virtue.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
You’ve remained on the battleground, center stage, experiencing life and, what’s more important, experiencing yourself experiencing it. You haven’t been reduced to a logistical strategy for somebody else’s life-war.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
The notion that inspired play (even when audacious, offensive, or obscene) enhances rather than diminishes intellectual vigor and spiritual fulfillment, the notion that in the eyes of the gods the tight-lipped hero and the wet-cheeked victim are frequently inferior to the red-nosed clown, such notions are destined to be a hard sell to those who have E.M. Forster on their bedside table and a clump of dried narcissus up their ass.Not to worry. As long as words and ideas exist, there will be a few misfits who will cavort with them in a spirit of *approfondement*–if I may borrow that marvelous French word that translates roughly as ‘playing easily in the deep’–and in so doing they will occasionally bring to realization Kafka’s belief that ‘a novel should be an ax for the frozen seas around us’.
— Tom Robbins
A few flat clouds folded themselves like crepes over fillings of apricot sky. Pompadours of supper-time smoke billowed from chimneys, separating into girlish pigtails as the breeze combed them out, above the slate rooftops. Chestnut blossoms, weary from having been admired all day, wore faint smiles of anticipation.
— Tom Robbins
There’s always the same amount of good luck and bad luck in the world. If one person doesn’t get the bad luck, somebody else will have to get it in their place. There’s always the same amount of good and evil, too. We can’t eradicate evil, we can only evict it, force it to move across town. And when evil moves, some good always goes with it. But we can never alter the ratio of good to evil. All we can do is keep things stirred up so neither good nor evil solidifies. That’s when things get scary. Life is like a stew, you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the top.
— Tom Robbins
In order to tame death, they refuse to completely enjoy life. In rejecting complete enjoyment, they are half-dead in advance – and that with no guarantee that their sacrifice will actually benefit them when all is done.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make others people’s decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or at the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it must be levity.
— Tom Robbins
Something has got to hold it together. I’m saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue.
— Tom Robbins
The party in Alobar’s head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: existence can be rearranged.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Besides, if I am truly immortal, I am my own grandchild, my own descendant, my own dynasty. I am not obliged to live on through what I pass down to others.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
But man by his nature is an unnatural animal. If any creature stands a chance of defeating death, it is man.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Now tequila may be the favored beverage of outlaws but that doesn’t mean it gives them preferential treatment. In fact, tequila probably has betrayed as many outlaws as has the central nervous system and dissatisfied wives. Tequila, scorpion honey, harsh dew of the doglands, essence of Aztec, crema de cacti; tequila, oily and thermal like the sun in solution; tequila, liquid geometry of passion; Tequila, the buzzard god who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying virgins; tequila, firebug in the house of good taste; O tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate!
— Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
Beer does not satisfy magic, however. So the magic ordered a round of Harvey Wallbangers. But it takes more than vodka to fuel magic. It takes risks. It takes EXTREMES.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
How can one person be more real than any other? Well, some people do hide and others seek. Maybe those who are in hiding … are simply inauthentic… But there are folks who 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 or 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
Don’t confuse symmetry with balance.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Laws, it is said, are for the protection of the people. It’s unfortunate that there are no statistics on the number of lives that are clobbered yearly as a result of laws: outmoded laws; laws that found their way onto the books as a result of ignorance, hysteria or political haymaking; antilife laws; biased laws; laws that pretend that reality is fixed and nature is definable; laws that deny people the right to refuse protection. A survey such as that could keep a dozen dull sociologists out of mischief for months.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
She thought of the things that lovely young women usually think about when they are relaxing in treetops and unhampered by underwear.
— Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, acting lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, that’s perfectly valid – but don’t go out trying to sell your beliefs to the system. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself.
— Tom Robbins
They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love.
— Tom Robbins
Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.
— Tom Robbins
Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival.
— Tom Robbins
The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being.
— Tom Robbins
In Seattle, I soon found that my radical ideas and aesthetic explorations – ideas and explorations that in Richmond, Virginia, might have gotten me stoned to death with hush puppies – were not only accepted but occasionally applauded.
— Tom Robbins
Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.
— Tom Robbins
I show up in my writing room at approximately 10 A.M. every morning without fail. Sometimes my muse sees fit to join me there and sometimes she doesn’t, but she always knows where I’ll be. She doesn’t need to go hunting in the taverns or on the beach or drag the boulevard looking for me.
— Tom Robbins
If little else, the brain is an educational toy.
— Tom Robbins
Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it’s the cyanide.
— Tom Robbins
The brutal truth is, we’re scarcely ‘educating’ children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we’re doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce.
— Tom Robbins
What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.
— Tom Robbins
The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is ‘write what you know, ‘ and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, ‘You can write about anything you can imagine.’
— Tom Robbins
People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.
— Tom Robbins
Our greatest human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.
— Tom Robbins
I have always been a romantic, one of those people who believes that a woman in pink circus tights contains all the secrets of the universe.
— Tom Robbins
To some extent, Seattle remains a frontier metropolis, a place where people can experiment with their lives, and change and grow and make things happen.
— Tom Robbins
The trickster’s function is to break taboos, create mischief, stir things up. In the end, the trickster gives people what they really want, some sort of freedom.
— Tom Robbins
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