Tom Robbins

To wit: actions, like sounds, divide the flow of time into beats.[...]The quality of a man's life depends on the rhyhmic structure he is able to impose upon the input and output of energy.

— 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 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

The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being.

— Tom Robbins

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.

— Tom Robbins

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

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

— 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

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

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

— 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

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

— 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

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

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

— Tom Robbins

You knows dat in New Orleans is not morning 'til dee sun come up.

— Tom Robbins

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.

— Tom Robbins

The only meat in the world sweeter, hotter, and pinker than Amanda's twat is Carolina barbecue.

— Tom Robbins

Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective.

— Tom Robbins

The function of the artist is to provide what life does not.

— Tom Robbins

Logic only gives man what he needs. Magic gives him what he wants.

— Tom Robbins

Fire is the reuniting of matter with oxygen. If one bears that in mind, every blaze may be seen as a reunion, an occasion of chemical joy.

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

There are only two mantras... yum and yuk. Mine is yum.

— Tom Robbins

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

It's not men who limit women, it's not straights who limit gays, it's not whites who limit blacks. What limits people is lack of character. What limits people is that they don't have the fucking nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it.

— Tom Robbins

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

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 or an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that question is: "Who knows how to make love stay?".

— Tom Robbins

If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done.

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

This baby (the Remington SL3 typewriter) speaks electric Shakespeare at the slightest provocation and will rap out a page and a half if you just look at it hard.

— 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

There is a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like a part of the act.

— Tom Robbins

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

Her surname resembled a line from an optometrist's examination chart.

— Tom Robbins

Hawaii made the mouth of her soul water.

— Tom Robbins

They'd be no threat to me. I have a black belt in Haiku. And a black vest in the cleaners.

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

Sharks are the criminals of the sea. Dolphins are the outlaws.

— Tom Robbins

She lunched on papaya poo poo or mango mu mu or some other fruity foo foo bursting with overripe tropical vowels.

— Tom Robbins

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

He looked at her with that kind of painted-on seriousness that comedians shift into when they get their chance to play Hamlet.

— Tom Robbins

The man and woman firmly shook hands. The solution to the overpopulation problem might rest in such handshakes.

— Tom Robbins

Faith is believing in something you know isn't true.

— Tom Robbins

A better world has gotta start somewhere. Why not with you and me?

— Tom Robbins

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

They snuggled closer, and when they were as close as they could get without being behind one another, they commenced to kiss again.

— Tom Robbins

This stuff's so fine Julius Caesar called for it with his dying breath. 'A toot, Brutus,' is what he said.

— Tom Robbins

Something has got to hold it together. I'm saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue.

— 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

"I'll follow him to the ends of the earth," she sobbed. Yes, darling. But the earth doesn't have any ends. Columbus fixed that.

— Tom Robbins

A rabbi's dog could score pork chops in the streets of Tel Aviv easier than Bernard could acquire tequila in King County Jail.

— Tom Robbins

She tried out the chamber pot, although she really had nothing to contribute.

— Tom Robbins

We modern human beings are looking at life, trying to make some sense of it; observing a 'reality' that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue--only we've all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text, we're given the Bible. Or the Talmud or the Koran. We're given Time magazine, and Reader's Digest, daily papers, and the six o'clock news; we're given schoolbooks, sitcoms, and revisionist histories; we're given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and heads of state. Unfortunately, none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is transpiring in the true theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We're attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe the barrom melodramas or kindergarten skits. And when's the last time you heard anybody bitch about it to the management?

— Tom Robbins

Any half-awake materialist well knows — that which you hold holds you.

— Tom Robbins

The first time that she spread her legs for him it had been like opening her jaws for the dentist.

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

I'll never write another novel on an electric typewriter. I'd rather use a sharp stick and a little pile of dogshit.

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.

— Tom Robbins

Bernard Mickey Wrangle had developed a psychological test of his own. It was short, simple, and infallible. To administer the test, merely ask the subject to name his or her favorite Beatle. If you are at all familiar with the distinct separate public images of the four Beatles, then you'll recognize that the one chosen reveals as much about the subject's personality as most of us will ever hope to know.

— Tom Robbins

This is the way to burn," the fuse seemed to be saying to the more docile, slow-witted candlewick. "Brilliantly, ecstatically, irrepressibly. This is the way to burn.

— Tom Robbins

Twenty candles on a cake. Twenty Camels in a pack. Twenty months in the federal pen. Twenty shots of tequila down a young girl's gullet. Twenty centuries since Our Lord's last pratfall, and after all that time we still don't know where passion goes when it goes.

— Tom Robbins

They glared at her the way any intelligent persons ought to glare when what they need is a smoke, a bite, a cup of coffee, a piece of ass, or a good fast-paced story, and all they're getting is philosophy.

— Tom Robbins

Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them 'deadlines'.

— Tom Robbins

I've always assumed that every time a child is born, the Divine reenters the world. Okay? That's the meaning of the Christmas story. And every time that child's purity is corrupted by society, that's the meaning of the Crucifixion story. Your man Jesus stands for that child, that pure spirit, and as its surrogate, he's being born and put to death again and again, over and over, every time we inhale and exhale, not just at the vernal equinox and on the twenty-fifth of December.

— Tom Robbins

I'm descended from a long line of preachers and policemen. Now, it's common knowledge that cops are congenital liars, and evangelists spend their lives telling fantastic tales in such a way as to convince otherwise rational people that they're factual. So, I guess I come by my narrative inclinations naturally. Moreover, I grew up in the rural South, where, although television has been steadily destroying it, there has always existed a love of colorful verbiage.

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

To pragmatists, the letter Z is nothing more than a phonetically symbolic glyph, a minor sign easily learned, readily assimilated, and occasionally deployed in the course of a literate life. To cynics, Z is just an S with a stick up its butt.

— Tom Robbins

All animals copulate but only humans osculate. Parakeets rub beaks? Sure they do, but only little old ladies who murder schoolchildren with knitting needles to steal their lunch money so that they can buy fresh kidneys to feed overweight kitty cats would place bird billing in the realm of the true kiss.

— Tom Robbins

Genius may stand on the shoulders of giants, but it stands alone.\xa0

— Tom Robbins

What we, thanks to Jung, call "synchronicity" (coincidence on steroids), Buddhists have long known as "the interpenetration of realities."\xa0Whether it's a natural law of sorts or simply evidence of mathematical inevitability (an infinite number of monkeys locked up with an infinite number of typewriters eventually producing Hamlet, not to mention Tarzan of the Apes), it seems to be as real as it is eerie.

— Tom Robbins

Watts published a luminous book entitled The Wisdom of Insecurity that ought to be required reading for every high school senior. Watts elaborates beautifully on what I've learned from observation and personal experience: namely, that security is an illusion.

— Tom Robbins

Just because something didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't true.

— Tom Robbins

Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.

— 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