Top 100 Tom Robbins Quotes
#1. 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
#2. In the end, perhaps we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that's continually retold in an accent too thick and strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke my friends. The soul is the punch line.
Tom Robbins
#3. The sky was the color of Edgar Allen Poe's pajamas.
Tom Robbins
#4. To live fully, one must be free, but to be free one must give up security. Therefore, to live one must be ready to die. How's that for a paradox?
Tom Robbins
#5. Must look into the botanical background of substance known as hashish, I jotted in my journal, writing by the light of candles that grew incessantly jewel-like even as protean wafts of incense approached my snout like platters of ripe fruits borne on the back of Nubian pages.
Tom Robbins
#6. 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
#7. I've begun to picture my abdominal cavity occupied instead by a single glowing globe,
Tom Robbins
#8. You know what the game of golf is, don't you? It's basketball for people who can't jump and chess for people who can't think.
Tom Robbins
#9. And it rained a fever. And it rained a silence. And it rained a sacrifice. And it rained a miracle. And it rained sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem.
Tom Robbins
#10. This lonely, uncompromising, obsessive tug-of-war with presumed reality, this is what art is all about.
Tom Robbins
#11. I have hitched and hiked over every state and half the nations, through blizzards and under rainbows, in deserts and cities, backward and side-ways, upstairs, downstairs and in my lady's chamber.
Tom Robbins
#12. Every individual has to assume responsibility for his or her own actions, even the poor and the young. A social system that decrees otherwise is inviting intellectual atrophy and spiritual stagnation.
Tom Robbins
#13. Language is not the frosting, it's the cake.
Tom Robbins
#14. I do not know why the dead do not come back to life. Perhaps death is so wonderful, in ways we cannot comprehend, that they prefer it over and above their friends and loved ones, although I am inclined to doubt that be the case.
Tom Robbins
#15. You have to eat your technique. Digest it. It's in your blood, but you're not concerned with it anymore.
Tom Robbins
#16. To perform without a net is ecstasy." Papa Phom had often reminded her, "To perform without focus is fatal.
Tom Robbins
#17. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation.
Tom Robbins
#18. Rap music ... sounds like somebody feeding a rhyming dictionary to a popcorn popper.
Tom Robbins
#19. There's no point in saving the world if it means losing the moon.
Tom Robbins
#20. Street Crime is the only logical response to America's drug policy just as terrorism is the only logical response to America's foreign policy
Tom Robbins
#21. Always compare yourself to the best. Even if you never measure up, it can't help but make you better.
Tom Robbins
#22. Education is for growth and fulfillment.
Tom Robbins
#23. Morality depends on culture. Culture depends on climate.
Tom Robbins
#24. They were straining so desperately for admission to paradise that they had forgotten that paradise had always been their address.
Tom Robbins
#25. We are seldom as limited as we think we are.
Tom Robbins
#26. Seattle rain smells different from New Orleans rain ... New Orleans rain smells of sulfur and hibiscus, trumpet metal, thunder and sweat. Seattle rain, the widespread rain of the Great Northwest, smells of green ice and sumi ink, of geology and silence and minnow breath.
Tom Robbins
#27. The first thunderstorm of the season was in the dressing room, donning its black robes and its necklace of hailstones, strapping on its electrical sword.
Tom Robbins
#28. When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free.
Tom Robbins
#29. Water- the ace of elements. Water dives from the clouds without parachute, wings or safety net. Water runs over the steepest precipice and blinks not a lash. Water is buried and rises again; water walks on fire and fire gets the blisters.
Tom Robbins
#30. There is a sense in which a painted stick is a stick in bloom. This stick points to the hidden face of God. Sometimes it points to you.
Tom Robbins
#31. Unless it was about to cause you bodily harm, rot your rhubarb on the stalk, or carry off your children, weather ought either to be celebrated or ignored.
Tom Robbins
#32. Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have known all along that it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.
Tom Robbins
#33. Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.
Tom Robbins
#34. I eat so much mayonnaise they were going to send me to the Mayo Clinic.
Tom Robbins
#35. Only the young and the beautiful should be allowed to fuck.
Tom Robbins
#36. Despair is ultimately destructive to oneself and a burden to others; and that if one persists in it, the gods will sooner or later lose patience and give one something to really despair about.
Tom Robbins
#37. Yet, when struck at a particular angle by a flicker of candlelight from the chandelier, its heart of wine-drenched velvet shone through.
Tom Robbins
#38. We seem to face an enemy who, no matter how many times we win, will best us in the end. He has so many allies: time, disease, boredom, stupidity, religious quackery, and bad habits.
Tom Robbins
#39. To the domesticated, nomads were an unwelcome reminder of instinct suppressed, liberty compromised, and control unimplemented.
Tom Robbins
#40. What if the Christ and the Messiah come, and they're two different guys?
Tom Robbins
#41. The new wrinkle is that escalating advances in technology are nourishing the narcissistic ego the way chicken manure nourishes a rose bush, while exploding worldwide population is allowing its effects to multiply geometrically.
Tom Robbins
#42. Plato did claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure.
Tom Robbins
#43. As they say in my country, have a nice day.
Tom Robbins
#44. People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.
Tom Robbins
#45. This program is subject to change
often unexpectedly, sometimes in the batting of an eye. It's the best argument I know against suicide.
Tom Robbins
#46. Among the Haida Indians of the Pacific Northwest, the verb for "making poetry" is the same as the verb "to breathe."
Such tidbits of ethnic lore delighted Amanda, and she vowed from that time onward she would try to regulate each breath as if she were composing a poem.
Tom Robbins
#47. Why procrastinate when you can precognitate?
Tom Robbins
#48. Leave it to a naive world-saver like you to view our love as a Sacred Cause when in actual fact all it was was some barking at the moon.
Tom Robbins
#49. Some folks hide, and some folks seek, and seeking, when it's mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous can be a form of hiding.
Tom Robbins
#50. Is that man's fate: to spend his closest hours to truth longing for a lie?
Tom Robbins
#51. On the subject of Egypt, Ellen Cherry was so vague she thought Ramses II was a jazz piano player. From that, we might conclude that she was equally dumb about jazz.
Tom Robbins
#52. Timbuktu. The last pure place. Isolation being the mother of purity. All men are jealous of Timbuktu because Timbuktu is removed from men, it's the wholeness men have fractured, the sacred extreme they've traded away.
Tom Robbins
#53. I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.
Tom Robbins
#54. 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
#55. Of our nine planets, Saturn is the one that looks like fun.
Tom Robbins
#56. A sense of humor ... is superior to any religion so far devised.
Tom Robbins
#57. 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
#58. At birth, we emerge from dream soup. At death, we sink back into dream soup. In between soups, there is a crossing of dry land. Life is a portage.
Tom Robbins
#59. What I'm saying is simply that every totalitarian society, no matter how strict, has had its underground. In fact, two undergrounds. There's the underground involved in political resistance and the underground involved in preserving beauty and fun
which is to say, preserving the human spirit.
Tom Robbins
#60. Of the seven deadly sins, lust is definitely the pick of the litter.
Tom Robbins
#61. Can't they comprehend that not ever'thing's done for a paycheck? That sometimes you just make a thing 'cause you wanna see how it'll turn out, 'cause you have a feeling in your gut that it oughta be made?
Tom Robbins
#62. SOUTH RICHMOND was a neighborhood of mouse holes, lace curtains, Sears catalogs, measles epidemics, baloney sandwiches - and men who knew more about the carburetor than they knew about the clitoris.
Tom Robbins
#63. She thought of the things that lovely young women usually think about when they are relaxing in treetops and unhampered by underwear.
Tom Robbins
#64. Matters are very seldom all black or white. They can even be both at the same time - The Beer Fairy
Tom Robbins
#65. The dinosaurs died so that chat rooms may flourish
Tom Robbins
#66. The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves.
Tom Robbins
#67. The concert had energized me in a peculiar and powerful way. It had jimmied the lock on my language box and smashed the last of my literary inhibitions.
Tom Robbins
#68. A sneeze travels at a peak velocity of two hundred miles per hour. A burp, more slowly; a fart, slower yet. But a kiss thrown by fingers- its departure is sudden, its arrival ambiguous, and there is no source that can state with authority what speeds are reached in its flight.
Tom Robbins
#69. My faith is whatever makes me feel good about being alive. If your religion doesn't make you feel good to be alive, what the hell is the point of it?
Tom Robbins
#70. We use so much bad language that it forms a barrier between ourselves and the truth.
Tom Robbins
#71. It was laughter that might have been squeezed from the tubes of his own darkest heart, then amplified fifty times through the bellows of a loon's ass.
Tom Robbins
#72. The notion of life implies a certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment
Tom Robbins
#73. Elsewhere, they might call the wind Mariah, but here its name was Something Fishy.
Tom Robbins
#74. My heart is a Latin American food stall and your love is a health inspector from Zurich.
Tom Robbins
#75. Our world isn't made of earth, air and water or even molecules and atoms; our world is made of language.
Tom Robbins
#76. There are apparently few limitations either of time or space on where the psyche might journey and only the customs inspector employed by our own inhibitions restricts what it might bring back when it reenters the home country of everyday consciousness.
Tom Robbins
#77. Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call sages, and those who act upon it, we call artists.
Tom Robbins
#79. Tilli stroked her Chihuahua. Max's heart made a sound like the sleigh bells on Mrs. Santa Claus's dildo.
Tom Robbins
#80. Do you hear, darlink, what the new dishwasher wants to be called? An 'underwater ceramics engineer,' already! Abu doesn't believe his ears. He doesn't realize what a big shot he used to be in the kitchen. Ha!
Tom Robbins
#81. The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy.
Tom Robbins
#82. Naked, she lay sprawled on her side like a shipwrecked cello.
Tom Robbins
#83. Almost any object, including this book you hold, can turn up as Exhibit A in a murder trial.
Tom Robbins
#84. Kissing is man's greatest invention. All animals copulate, but only humans kiss.
Tom Robbins
#85. The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism.
Tom Robbins
#86. 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
#87. Usually, autobiography is such an indulgence of the ego.
Tom Robbins
#89. Authority is to be ridiculed, outwitted and avoided.
Tom Robbins
#90. You can't rest in the shade of a human, not even a roly-poly one; and isn't it refreshing that trees can undergo periodic change without having a nervous breakdown over it?
Tom Robbins
#91. Here's an idea: let's get over ourselves, buy a cherry pie, and go fall in love with life.
Tom Robbins
#92. The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.
Tom Robbins
#93. 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
#94. It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful ...
Tom Robbins
#95. Life's an offensive proposition from beginning to end. Maybe those who can't tolerate offense ought to just go ahead and end it all, and maybe those who demand financial compensation for offense ought to have it ended for them.
Tom Robbins
#96. Sentimental memories were like sugar-water icicles.
Tom Robbins
#97. My personal motto has always been: Joy in spite of everything. Not just [mindless] joy, but joy in spite of everything. Recognizing the inequities and the suffering and the corruption and all that but refusing to let it rain on my parade. And I advocate this to other people.
Tom Robbins
#98. Can a woman who does not know the contents of her handbag know the contents of her heart?
Tom Robbins
#99. In the end what will prevail is your passion not your tale, for love is the Holy Grail.
Tom Robbins
#100. My desire was no less than before, you understand, but I no longer identified with the desire. Perhaps that is why 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
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