Tom Robbins Quotes

Nostalgia's nice enough in little bitty doses, it puts personal peach fuzz on the hard ass of history.

...to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on heaven is to create hell.

People tend the take everything too seriously. Especially themselves. Yep. And that's probably what makes 'em scared and hurt so much of the time. Life is too serious to take that seriously.

Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death.

If you lack the iron and the fuzz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked. The dull and prosaic will be granted adventures that will dice their central nervous systems like an onion, romantic dreamers will end up in the rope yard. You may protest that it is too much to ask of an uneducated fifteen-year-old girl that she defy her family, her society, her weighty cultural and religious heritage in order to pursue a dream that she doesn't really understand. Of course it is asking too much. The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense.

keep your eye on the ball, even if you cannot see the ball.

On the campus of Outlaw College, professors of essential insanities would characterize the conflicting attitudes of Nina Jablonski and Leigh-Cheri as indicative of a general conflict between social idealism and romanticism. As any of the learned professors would explain, plied with sufficient tequila, no matter how fervently a romantic might support a movement, he or she eventually must withdraw from active participation in that movement because the group ethic — the supremacy of the organization over the individual — is an affront to intimacy. Intimacy is the principal source of the sugars with which this life is sweetened. It is absolutely vital to the essential insanities.

I sense that novel of my dreams is in the Remington SL3 — although it writes much faster than I can spell.

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

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

Just because you're naked doesn't mean you're sexy. Just because you're cynical doesn't mean you're cool.

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

The key to self-generated happiness (the only reliable kind) is the refusal to take oneself too seriously.

We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.