Tom Robbins Quotes

296 Sourced Quotes

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
True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.

Tom Robbins
I'm not quite twenty, but, thanks to you, I've learned something that many women these days never learn: Prince Charming really is a toad. And the Beautiful Princess has halitosis. The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love. Wouldn't that be the way to make love stay?

Tom Robbins
We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.

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
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
The word desire suggests that there is something we do not have. If we have everything already, then there can be no desire, for there is nothing left to want. I think that what the Buddha may have been trying to tell us is that we have it all, each of us, all the time; therefore, desire is simply unnecessary.

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

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

Tom Robbins
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
A person can't make a career out of somebody else's invective.

Tom Robbins
It is as if the soul of the continent is weeping. Why does it weep? It weeps for the bones of the buffalo. It weeps for magic that has been forgotten. It weeps for the decline of poets.It weepsfor the black people who think like white people.It weepsfor the Indians who think like settlers.It weepsfor the children who think like adults.It weepsfor the free who think like prisoners.Most of all, it weepsfor the cowgirls who think like cowboys.

Tom Robbins
So this, then, is the chamber of the hootchy-kootch. Its bathtub full of orchids. Its closet full of smoke.

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
Leave me in the night but please don't leave me in the dark

Tom Robbins
Sometimes those things that attract the most attention to us are the things that afford us the greatest privacy.

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

Tom Robbins
Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.

Tom Robbins
From the air, Vatican City looked like a marble Monopoly set. The Church owned all the property from Broadwalk to Illinois Avenue, has three hotels on every lot, and no matter how often it tossed the dice you just knew it would never land on Go to Jail, it would be forever passing Go and collecting $200.

Tom Robbins
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
In the quiet ache of the evening, Alobar listened to his calluses grow.

Tom Robbins
The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.

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

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