Tom Robbins Quotes

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

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

Language is not the frosting, it's the cake. ~ Tom Robbins

If you could buckle your Bugs Bunny wristwatch to a ray of light, your watch would continue ticking but the hands wouldn't move. That's because at the speed of light there is no time. Time is relative to velocity. At high speeds, time is literally stretched. Since light is the ultimate in velocity, at light-speed time is stretched to its absolute and becomes static. Albert Einstein figured that one out. ~ Tom Robbins

Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. ~ Tom Robbins

More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn't get any better than that. ~ Tom Robbins

At the bat of your lashes peacocks preen. Peacocks preen, elephants remember, camels go for days without water, and dinosaurs of all types become extinct. ~ Tom Robbins

To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese. ~ Tom Robbins

This is the room where Jezebel frescoed her eyelids with history's tragic glitter ~ Tom Robbins

If the earth needs night as well as day, wouldn't it follow that the soul requires endarkenment to balance enlightenment? ~ Tom Robbins

What looks to be a wisp of cloud is actually the moon, narrow and pale like a paring snipped from a snowman's toenail. ~ Tom Robbins

(Actually, 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

Tennessee Williams once wrote, 'We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.' Yes, but oh! What a view from that upstairs window! What Tennessee failed to mention was that if we look out of that window with an itchy curiousity and a passionate eye; with a generous spirit and a capacity for delight; and yes, the language with which to support and enrich the thing we see, then it DOESN'T MATTER that the house is burning down around us. It doesn't matter. Let the motherfucker blaze! ~ Tom Robbins

I would only read the novels that people classify as 'beach books' if I were being held prisoner and the only alternative was the 'Book of Mormon.' ~ Tom Robbins

My comic sense, although deliberately Americanized, is, in its intent, much closer related to the crazy wisdom of Zen monks and the goofy genius of Taoist masters than it is to, say, the satirical gibes on Saturday Night Live. It has both a literary and a metaphysical function. ~ Tom Robbins

The odd thing was, Dickie longed to experience that feeling. It wasn't any kind of death wish: there was not a suicidal cell in his body. rather, it seemed that the very sensation, the inner force that made Dickie's scrotum tighten, his throat constrict, and his eyeballs swim in dizziness also made him want to tumble into the precipitous void. And ultimately, his fear of longing to fall was greater, more disturbing, than his fear of falling. ~ Tom Robbins

I've begun to picture my abdominal cavity occupied instead by a single glowing globe, ~ Tom Robbins

To behave as if the thermostats on their imaginations were set permanently on high. ~ Tom Robbins

Not surprisingly, the socks remain silent, as was their legal right. ~ Tom Robbins

Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked. ~ Tom Robbins

And while meanness is a function of the insensitive, grumpiness is merely a function of the dissatisfied. ~ Tom Robbins

Throughout most of our history, nothing - not flood, famine, plague, or new weapons - has endangered humanity one-tenth as much as the narcissistic ego, with its self-aggrandizing presumptions and its hell-hound spawn of fear and greed. ~ Tom Robbins

Much more than an entertaining set of exaggerated facts, fiction is a metaphoric method of describing, dramatizing and condensing historical events, personal actions, psychological states and the symbolic knowledge encoded within the collective unconscious; things, events and conditions that are otherwise too diffuse and/or complex to be completely digested or appreciated by the prevailing culture. ~ Tom Robbins

I love hot hand of explosion. I love a breeze perfumed with the devil smell of powder. ~ Tom Robbins

...on a number of occasions this book has made reference to magic, and each time you've shaken your head, muttering such criticisms as "What does he mean by 'magic' anyhow? It's embarrassing to find a grown man talking about magic in such a manner. How can anybody take him seriously?" Or, as slightly more gracious readers have objected, "Doesn't the author realize that one can't write about magic? One can create it but not discuss it. It's much too gossamer for that. Magic can be neither described nor defined. Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to slice roast beef."

To which the author now replies, Sorry, freeloaders, you're clever but you're not quite correct. Magic isn't the fuzzy, fragile, abstract and ephemeral quality you think it is. In fact, magic is distinguished from mysticism by its very concreteness and practicality. Whereas mysticism is manifest only in spiritual essence, in the transcendental state, magic demands a steady naturalistic base. Mysticism reveals the ethereal in the tangible. Magic makes something permanent out of the transitory, coaxes drama from the colloquial. ~ Tom Robbins

Toys are made in heaven, batteries are made in hell. ~ Tom Robbins

Birth, copulation, and death. Fine. In truth, however, there were at least two other things in which Amanda strongly believed. Namely: magic and freedom. ~ Tom Robbins

Fear limits love ~ 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

I have never ever Googled myself; in fact I think the Christian right prohibits such things. ~ Tom Robbins

The Divine was expansive, but religion was reductive. Religion attempted to reduce the Divine to a knowable quantity with which mortals might efficiently deal, to pigeonhole it once and for all so that we never had to reevaluate it. With hammers of cant and spikes of dogma, we crucified and crucified again, trying to nail to our stationary altars the migratory light of the world. ~ Tom Robbins

Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard. ~ Tom Robbins

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

O shoe, leather ship that sails our cement rivers and woven seas, steering by the star of fashion, circumnavigating hostile reefs of tar and bubble gum; one hour, a tanker ferrying champagne to a playboy's sip; the next, a raft in the slime; bon voyage, bright barge! May you dock in calm closets, safe from the rape of shoe trees. ~ Tom Robbins

There was no wire across in those days, no big house on the other side; nothing but the open yap of the planet, yawning as if bored by the pace of evolution. ~ Tom Robbins

Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it may be levity. ~ Tom Robbins

As a grandiose self-deception, war is o' the same magnitude as religion. We embrace war or religion - usually both at the same time - as a means o' defeatin' death, but neither o' them do a blinkin' thing but sanction dyin'. Throughout history, Death's best friend has been a priest with a knife. ~ Tom Robbins

One has not only an ability to perceive the world but an ability to alter one's perception of it; more simply, one can change things by the manner in which one looks at them. ~ Tom Robbins

Actually, there are countless ways to live upon this tremorous sphere in mirth and good health, and probably only one way - the industrial, urbanized, herding way - to live here stupidly, and man has hit upon that one way. ~ Tom Robbins

Thomas rather thought Foley might ask what purpose was served by an economy whose success and protection depended on people living in ugly, sterile, unhealthy environments-he'd met that argument before and admittedly had had some difficulty refuting it-but the ex-pilot merely shrugged and said, There's more to trees than you think. I've run across some trees I'd sooner hug than a woman. ~ Tom Robbins

Every day is Judgement Day. Always has been. Always will be. ~ Tom Robbins

Since religion bore false witness to the Divine, religion was blasphemy. And once it entered into its unholy alliance with politics, it became the most dangerous and repressive force that the world has ever known. ~ Tom Robbins

So, the scholars are tedious, the experts never see the whole truth of things, still they have their role to play. ~ Tom Robbins

Cowgirl Interlude (Bonanza Jellybean)
She is lying on the family sofa in flannel pajamas. There is Kansas City mud on the tips and heels of her boots, boots that have yet to savor real manure. Fourteen, she knows she ought to remove her boots, yet she refuses. A Maverick rerun is on TV; she is eating beef jerky, occasionally slurping. On her upper stomach, where her pajama top has ridden up, is a small deep scar. She tells everyone, including her school nurse, that it was made by a silver bullet.
Whatever the origin of the extra hole in her belly, there are unmistakable signs of gunfire int he woodwork by the closet door. It was there that she once shot up one half of an old pair of sneakers. "Self-defense," she pleaded, when her parents complained. "It was a [sic] out-law tennis shoe.
Billy the Ked. ~ Tom Robbins

Well, history isn't ever going to end, happily or unhappily. And history is ending every second - happily for some of us, unhappily for others, happily one second, unhappily the next. History is always ending and always not ending, and both ways there is nothing to wait for ~ Tom Robbins

Grinning, she hovered over him. Then, like a fist closing around a doorknob, her grin closed around him. With her lips, she turned the knob first one way and then the other: left, right, open, shut; left, right, open, shut. The knob did not squeak. In fact, Wiggs was unusually quiet.

Now, falling into rhythm, she sucked the knob from its axle, sucked the axle from its door, the door from its hinges. Out onto the lawn, tempo increasing, she sucked up the flagstone walk, the rosebushes, the petunia bed, the sprinkler, the driveway, and the small Japanese car parked in the driveway: oh, what a feeling! Toyota! Wiggs moaned as the neighborhood disappeared.

The towers of the city began to sway, and soon, the planet itself fell victim to the force, swelling at its equator, throbbing at its poles. It wobbled violently on its axis, once, twice, then exploded. The Big Bang theory, proven at last. Continuing to impersonate a black hole, she pulled in every drop and particle – she'd never had a man in such entirety – and it wasn't until the final spasm had subsided and the cosmos was at peace that she loosened her grip and, lips glistening like the Milky Way, looked up to see – the legs of a third party standing there. ~ Tom Robbins

The mission of the artist in an over-technologi zed society, is to call the old magic back to life. ~ Tom Robbins

Nature is not infallible. Nature makes mistakes. That's what evolution is all about: growth by trail and error. Nature can be stupid and cruel. Oh, my, how cruel! That's okay. There's nothing wrong with Nature being dumb and ugly because it is simultaneously--paradoxically--brilliant and superb.

But to worship the natural at the exclusion of the unnatural is to practice Organic Fascism--which is what many of my pilgrims practice. And in the best tradition of fascism, they are totally intolerant of those who don't share their beliefs; thus, they foster the very kinds of antagonism and tension that lead to strife, which they, pacifists one and all, claim to abhor. To insist that a woman who paints berry juice on her lips is somehow superior to the woman who wears Revlon lipstick is sophistry; it's smug sophistical skunkshit. Lipstick is a chemical composition, so is berry juice, and they both are effective for decorating the face. If lipstick has advantages over berry juice then let us praise that part of technology that produced lipstick. The organic world is wonderful, bot the inorganic isn't bad, either. The world of plastic and artifice offers its share of magical surprises.

A thing is good because it's good, not because it's natural. A thing is bad because it's bad, not because it's artificial. It's not a damn iota better to be bitten by a rattlesnake than shot by a gun. ~ Tom Robbins

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

It had been reported that Tanuki fell from the sky using his scrotum as a parachute. ~ Tom Robbins

To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being. ~ Tom Robbins

Plato did claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure. ~ Tom Robbins

The camel has a big dumb ugly hump. But in the desert, where prettier, more streamlined beasts die quickly of thirst, the camel survives quite nicely. As legend has it, the camel carries its own water, stores it in its stupid hump. If individuals, like camels, perfect their inner resources, if we have the power within us, then we can cross any wasteland in relative comfort and survive in arid surroundings without relying on the external. Often, moreover, it is our "hump" - 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

Jackson Pollock said once, "I don't really feel that many people in this world are alive." He said, "That's why I like you, Tom. You're alive." ~ Tom Robbins

Simultaneously a frantic, high-tech juggernaut and a timeless Asian dream, Bangkok straddles like no other metropolis the boundary between acrid and sweet, soft and hard, sacred and profane. It's a silk buzz saw, a lacquered jackhammer, a steel-belted seduction, a digital prayer. ~ Tom Robbins

The problem here, Gwen, is that the more desperate you are to achieve financial success and the tighter you hold on to what you've got, the greater your chances of losing it. Money's like love in that respect. ~ Tom Robbins

I love myself," he said. "But it's unrequited. ~ Tom Robbins

Life isn't simple; it's overwhelmingly complex. The love of simplicity is an escapist drug, like alcohol. ~ Tom Robbins

There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for. ~ Tom Robbins

If love eats the donut, does time eat the hole? ~ Tom Robbins

Bland writing - timid, antiseptic, vanilla writing - is nearly as unhealthy as the brutal and dark. Instead of sipping, say, elixir, nectar, tequila, or champagne, the reader is invited to slurp lumpy milk or choke on the author's dust bunnies. ~ Tom Robbins

A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and _The Last Whole Earth Catalog_. ~ Edward Abbey

If you were Jesus with missing years to kill where would you go? ~ Tom Robbins

They were straining so desperately for admission to paradise that they had forgotten that paradise had always been their address. ~ Tom Robbins

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

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

Your petal from the salty rose ~ Tom Robbins

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

I went to a large consolidated school in Appalachia. And I wrote the story when I was in the second grade and I took it up to the third floor to the school newspaper office that was written and edited by juniors and seniors. ~ Tom Robbins

There are people in this world who can wear whale masks and people who cannot, and the wise know to which group they belong. ~ Tom Robbins

Christianity ... is an Eastern religion. ~ Tom Robbins

Nothing is implied here. Except the possibility that everything is connected. ~ Tom Robbins

If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and
push 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 of
magic. ~ Tom Robbins

Solace? That's why God made fermented beverages and the blues. ~ Tom Robbins

They say that February is the shortest month, but you know they could be wrong. ~ Tom Robbins

Plans are one thing and fate another. When they coincide, success results. Yet success mustn't be considered the absolute. It is questionable, for that matter, whether success is an adequate resposne to life. Success can eliminate as many options as failure. ~ Tom Robbins

Wasn't it made clear that civilization is not an end in itself but a theater or gymnasium in which the evolving individual finds facilities for practice? ~ Tom Robbins

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

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

The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea but with the people who are attracted to it, who adopt it, who cling to it until their last nail breaks, and who invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and, most importantly, sense of humor, to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideas are made by masters, dogma by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road. ~ 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

All things considered, I've learned more from talking to painters than talking to writers. Not that painters are smarter than writers, such is seldom the case, but in conversation writers are inclined to waste an inordinate amount of time either bragging or bellyaching about reviews and royalties, complaining about their publishers, or dissing other authors. Painters, being equally insecure, can likewise come across as boring and bitchy
it's tough being creative in a materialistic society
but since they labor not in vineyards of verbiage but upon ice floes of visual images, they tend to function with fewer inhibitions than the wordsmiths when it comes to vocally exploring and expressing ideas. Since no one judges their speech, comparing it to their written work, they don't feel so acutely the weight of language. ~ Tom Robbins

So, it was to the pay phone that she descended, bearing the coin of the realm. ~ Tom Robbins

Though February lay about her shoulders like a cloak of lead. ~ Tom Robbins

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

Personally, I prefer Stevie Wonder," confessed the Chink, "but what the hell. Those cowgirls are always bitching because the only radio station in the area plays nothing but polkas, but I say you can dance to anything if you really feel like dancing." To prove it, he got up and danced to the news. ~ Tom Robbins

In technological development, in production of material goods and creature comforts, we've challenged the very gods, but psychologically, emotionally, we're scarcely more than chimpanzees with bulldozers, baboons with big bombs. ~ Tom Robbins

There's a certain Buddhistic calm that comes from having ... money in the bank. ~ Tom Robbins

In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak. ~ Tom Robbins

The wind had its arms around them. The sea dandled them on its knee. ~ Tom Robbins

In the beginning was the thing. And one thing led to another. ~ Tom Robbins

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

One of the other musicians said that the tambourine is a female due to the fact that it makes a pretty jingle and is designed to be spanked. That is the more recent, patriarchal attitude, I suppose. ~ Tom Robbins

Madame Lily Devalier always asked "Where are you?" in a way that insinuated that there were only two places on earth one could be: New Orleans and somewhere ridiculous. ~ Tom Robbins

True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. ~ Tom Robbins

Of course I'm inconsistent! Only logicians and cretins are consistent! ~ 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

One of my books is a hallucinogen, an aphrodisiac, a mood elevator, an intellectual garage door opener, and a metaphysical trash compactor. They'll do everything except rotate your tires. ~ Tom Robbins

Those who willingly accept being conned are as corrupt as those who con them. ~ Tom Robbins

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