Tom Robbins Quotes

296 Sourced Quotes

As expected, you get his machine. Someday, even the "call of nature" will be answered by a machine.

Tom Robbins
When we accept bad art because it's good politics, we're killing the swan to feed the chickens.

Tom Robbins
Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

Tom Robbins
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
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
Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it.

Tom Robbins
Maybe most people were fundamentally contradictory. The real people at any rate.

Tom Robbins
Purpose! Purposes are for animals with a hell of a lot more dignity than the human race! Just hop on that strange torpedo and ride it to wherever it's going.

Tom Robbins
In this world that God (or Mother Nature) created, it is always hazard and novelty-hazard and novelty-which assert themselves, thereby rendering notions of fixity absurd. Incongruously enough, however, when we allow ourselves to fully accept uncertainty, to embrace and cultivate it even, then we actually can begin to feel within ourselves the presence of an Absolute. The person who cannot welcome ambiguity cannot welcome God.

Tom Robbins
But the center can be a harmful place for one who has lived so long on the edge.... Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.

Tom Robbins
Once, in a spasm of sappiness, you asked Q-Jo if she thought your dreams would ever come true. 'You aren't talking about dreams,' she corrected you, 'you're referring to your pathetic bourgeoisie ambitions. Dreams don't come true. Dreams are true.

Tom Robbins
When we can converse with the animals, we will know the change is halfway here. When we can converse with the forest, we will know the change has come.

Tom Robbins
Would you complain because a beautiful sunset doesn't have a future or a shooting star a payoff? And why should romance 'lead anywhere'? Passion isn't a path through the woods. Passion is the woods.

Tom Robbins
Those same forces that drive a genius to create the things or ideas that entertain or enlighten us often gobble so much of his personality that he has none left for the social graces.

Tom Robbins
The author isn't altogether certain that there is any such thing as exaggeration. Our brains permit us to use such a wee fraction of their resources that, in a sense, everything we experience is a reduction. We employ drugs, yoga techniques and poetics - and a thousand more clumsy methods - in an effort just to bring things back up to normal.

Tom Robbins
Our Moon has surrendered none of its soft charm to technology. The pitter-patter of little spaceboots has in no way diminished its mystery.

Tom Robbins
The very act of creation requires such focused concentration that vast areas of knowledge may be completely overlooked. Well, so what? There is no evidence that generalized skills are in any way superior to specialized brilliance.

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
There are times when we can feel destiny close around us like a fist around a doorknob. Sure, we can resist. But a knob that won't turn, a door that sticks and never budges, is a nuisance to the gods. The gods may kick in the jamb. Worse, they may walk away in disgust, leaving us to hang dumbly from our tight hinges, deprived of any other chance in life to swing open into unnecessary risk and thus into enchantment.

Tom Robbins
Actually, there are countless ways to live upon this tremorous sphere in mirth and good health, and probably only one way - the industrial, urbanized, herding way - to live here stupidly, and man has hit upon that one way.

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
In the end what will prevail is your passion not your tale, for love is the Holy Grail.

Tom Robbins
Certainly that sputterless little candleflame of the mediocre mind known as 'common sense' has never produced anything worth celebrating.

Tom Robbins
We all dream profusely every night, yet by morning we've forgotten ninety percent of what went on. That's why poets are such important members of society. Poets remember our dreams for us.

Tom Robbins
Human beings were not well served by permanence or stasis. Obviously, if individuals were progressing, they were undergoing a series of presumably desirable alterations, but in a universe where flux is fundamental, it can be argued that even change for the worse is preferable to no change at all. Isn't fixity the hallmark of the living dead?.

Tom Robbins
A Hamburger is warm and fragrant and juicy. A hamburger is soft and nonthreatening. It personifies the Great Mother herself who has nourished us from the beginning. A hamburger is an icon of layered circles, the circle being at once the most spiritual and the most sensual of shapes. A hamburger is companionable and faintly erotic. The nipple of the Goddess, the bountiful belly-ball of Eve. You are what you think you eat.

Tom Robbins