Top 100 Tom Robbins Quotes
#1. A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and _The Last Whole Earth Catalog_.
Edward Abbey
#2. In a voice that sounds the way a can of cheap dog food would sound if a can of cheap dog food could speak, he tells you you are looking well.
Tom Robbins
#3. THE SKY IS MORE IMPERSONAL than the sea.
Tom Robbins
#4. There is no death. There are only different levels of life.
Tom Robbins
#5. And it rained a screaming. And it rained a rawness. And it rained a plasma. And it rained a disorder.
Tom Robbins
#6. How can you admire a human who consciously embraces the bland, the mediocre, and the safe rather than risk the suffering that disappointment can bring?
Tom Robbins
#7. 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
#8. There exists a false aristocracy based on family name, property, and inherited wealth. But there likewise exists a true aristocracy based on intelligence, talent and virtue.
Tom Robbins
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. If being alive is not a virtue, then there is little virtue in virtue.
Tom Robbins
#12. I'd like to think that had I known the truth, I might have been a kinder, more loving person. If only we knew the Truth, mightn't we all?
Tom Robbins
#13. Toys are made in heaven, batteries are made in hell.
Tom Robbins
#14. Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means.
Tom Robbins
#15. Does koala bear poop smell like cough drops?
Tom Robbins
#16. What difference does it make if the Gospel is mostly a lie? It's an engrossing story and the words of its hero are excellent words to live by, even today.
Tom Robbins
#17. The most useful thing about art is it's uselessness.
Tom Robbins
#18. The sky was the color of Edgar Allen Poe's pajamas.
Tom Robbins
#19. Although surely she realized that space is merely a device to prevent everything from being in the same spot.
Tom Robbins
#20. The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable.
Tom Robbins
#21. His first - and worst - mistake was blindly doing what he was told to do. Without questioning their methods or their motives, he allowed politicians to make the decisions that led to his early demise.
Tom Robbins
#22. Western civilization was declining too fast for comfort, but too slowly to be very exciting.
Tom Robbins
#23. There were, in his opinion, drugs that diminished ego and drugs that engorged ego, which is to say, revelatory drugs and delusory drugs; and on a psychic level, at least, he favored awe over swagger.
Tom Robbins
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Sharks are the criminals of the sea. Dolphins are the outlaws.
Tom Robbins
#27. The purpose of art is to provide what life does not.
Tom Robbins
#28. 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
#29. There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.
Tom Robbins
#30. America is a nation of 270 million people: 100 million of them are gangsters, another 100 million are hustlers, 50 million are complete lunatics, and every single one of us is secretly in show business. Isn't that fabulous?
Tom Robbins
#31. 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
#32. Writing is the hardest physical work there is.
Tom Robbins
#33. The kingdom of formal ideas will always be a weak neighbor to the kingdom of thrills
Tom Robbins
#34. I like travelers, but I don't like tourists. The difference is that travelers don't shop and they don't play golf.
Tom Robbins
#35. When a man confines an animal in a cage, he assumes ownership of that animal. But an animal is an individual; it cannot be owned. When a man tries to own an individual, whether that individual be another man, an animal or even a tree, he suffers the psychic consequences of an unnatural act.
Tom Robbins
#36. 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
#37. Like women in general, like Aries women in particular, like redheaded Aries women in greater particular, she loathed to be misunderstood. Injustice against others outraged her, injustice against herself set her to boiling like brimstone soup.
Tom Robbins
#38. People tend to take everything too seriously. Especially themselves.
Tom Robbins
#39. Death is not a resident of the house. 'Death' is merely the name we give to certain rooms of the house, rooms that we, the so-called 'living,' fear for the simple reason that we have not passed through them.
Tom Robbins
#40. Family trouble was the worst kind. Some families ran their own little versions of the Middle East.
Tom Robbins
#41. Survival is not important. What matters is how you survive.
Tom Robbins
#42. Men live by embedding themselves in ongoing systems of illusion. Religion. Patriotism. Economics. Fashion. That sort of thing.
Tom Robbins
#43. 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
#44. Your author has found love to be the full trip, emotionally speaking; the grand tour: fall in love, visit both Heaven and Hell for the price of one.
Tom Robbins
#46. Upon patterned cushions that might have been honked, zig by zag, out of Ornette Coleman's horn, the odalisque exposed her flesh to a society that had grown frightened again of flesh.
Tom Robbins
#47. Hard times and funky living can season the soul, true enough, but joy is the yeast that makes it rise.
Tom Robbins
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. There is, however, a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like part of the act.
Tom Robbins
#52. The Devil doesn't make us do anything. The Devil, for example, doesn't make us mean. Rather, when we're mean, we make the Devil. Literally. Our actions create him. Conversely, when we behave with compassion, generosity, and grace, we create God in the world.
Tom Robbins
#53. I've begun to picture my abdominal cavity occupied instead by a single glowing globe,
Tom Robbins
#54. (a hangover without a head to torment is like a philanthropist without an institution to endow),
Tom Robbins
#55. I'm probably more interested in sentences than anything else in life.
Tom Robbins
#56. 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
#57. In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.
Tom Robbins
#59. 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
#60. Summer had come to sit on New York's face.
Tom Robbins
#61. Every time a person goes to the mall, she loses a little piece of her soul
Tom Robbins
#62. At the meeting of our lips, peacocks went into hiding, elephants suffered memory loss, camels developed a maddening thirst, and dinosaurs long thought to be extinct turned up on the evening news.
Tom Robbins
#63. And while meanness is a function of the insensitive, grumpiness is merely a function of the dissatisfied.
Tom Robbins
#64. What we have here is an unexpected touchdown on the runway of the heart.
Tom Robbins
#65. There are essential and inessential insanities. The later are solar in character, the former are linked to the moon.
Tom Robbins
#66. The pain of love does not break hearts, it merely seasons them. The disappointed heart revives itself and grows meaty and piquant. Sorrow expands it and makes it pithy. The spirit, on the other hand, can snap like a bone and may never fully knit
Tom Robbins
#67. You knows dat in New Orleans is not morning 'til dee sun come up.
Tom Robbins
#68. I think science has begun to demonstrate that aging is a disease. If it is, it can be cured.
Tom Robbins
#69. Heaven is living in your hopes and Hell is living in your fears. It's up to each individual which one he chooses.
Tom Robbins
#70. Well, I have never, ever Googled myself.
Tom Robbins
#71. If the earth needs night as well as day, wouldn't it follow that the soul requires endarkenment to balance enlightenment?
Tom Robbins
#72. It's good to bear in mind that like it or not, enlightenment has always been, even in a golden age, pretty much limited to an elite.
Tom Robbins
#73. Ellen Cherry understood then that religion was an improper response to the Divine.
Tom Robbins
#74. A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.
Tom Robbins
#75. To practice a religion can be lovely, to believe in one is almost always disastrous.
Tom Robbins
#76. This lonely, uncompromising, obsessive tug-of-war with presumed reality, this is what art is all about.
Tom Robbins
#77. Salvador Dali and fifty cents will get you a cup of clock melt.
Tom Robbins
#78. Words on a page can hypnotize you if the rhythm is right
Tom Robbins
#79. 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
#80. Enlightened and endarkened. The ultimate.
Tom Robbins
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. And what would our ideas of God, of religion, be like if they had come to us through the minds of women? Ever think of that?
Tom Robbins
#84. They say that February is the shortest month, but you know they could be wrong.
Tom Robbins
#85. Language is not the frosting, it's the cake.
Tom Robbins
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. You have to eat your technique. Digest it. It's in your blood, but you're not concerned with it anymore.
Tom Robbins
#89. 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. Answer me that and I will ease your mind about the beginning and the end of time. Answer me that and I will reveal to you the purpose of the moon.
Tom Robbins
#90. Morels are ugly in the skillet. The caps look like the scrotums of leprechauns, the stems like the tusks of fetal elephants.
Tom Robbins
#91. To perform without a net is ecstasy." Papa Phom had often reminded her, "To perform without focus is fatal.
Tom Robbins
#92. The beet must have been out of the ground a week or more, for it had the ashen exterior of a cancer victim.
Tom Robbins
#93. I have never ever Googled myself; in fact I think the Christian right prohibits such things.
Tom Robbins
#94. 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
#95. If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it.
Tom Robbins
#96. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation.
Tom Robbins
#97. (Claude and Marcel LeFever were speaking in French. This simultaneous English translation is being beamed to the reader via literary satellite.)
Tom Robbins
#98. You don't have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House.
Tom Robbins
#99. 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
#100. From the outside, my life may look chaotic, but inside I feel like some kind of monk licking an ice cream cone while straddling a runaway horse.
Tom Robbins
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