Tom Robbins Quotes

296 Sourced Quotes

The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves.

Tom Robbins
Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good. Moreover, a lout thrashing about in the clear waters of wisdom will dirty those waters for everyone else.

Tom Robbins
I travel in gardens and bedrooms, basements and attics, around corners, through doorways and windows, along sidewalks, over carpets, down drainpipes, in the sky, with friends, lovers, children and heros; perceived, remembered, imagined, distorted and clarified.

Tom Robbins
Whatever goes wrong can be used to your advantage, providing it goes wrong enough.

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

Tom Robbins
When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on — series polygamy — until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimension to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.

Tom Robbins
How we shape our understanding of others' lives is determined by what we find memorable in them, and that in turn is determined not by any potentially accurate overview of another's personality but rather by the tension and balance that exist in our daily relationships.

Tom Robbins
Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means.

Tom Robbins
The harsh truth is, most red-haired men look like blondes who've spoiled from lack of refrigeration. They look like brown-haired men who've been composted out behind the barn. Yet that same pigmentation that on a man can resemble leaf mold or junkyard rust, a woman wears like a tiara of rubies.

Tom Robbins
On the poor use of grammar It's a matter of usage. If a house is off-plumb and rickety and lets in the wind, you blame the mason, not the bricks. Our words are up to the job. It's our syntax that's limiting.

Tom Robbins
Keep your eye on the ball, even if you cannot see the ball.

Tom Robbins
Kissing is our greatest invention. On the list of great inventions, it ranks higher than the Thermos bottle and the Airstream trailer; higher, even, than room service.

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
The winter passed as slowly and peacefully as a boa constrictor digesting a valium addict.

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
Rap music... sounds like somebody feeding a rhyming dictionary to a popcorn popper.

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

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
On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.

Tom Robbins
Dip a slice of bread in batter. That's September: yellow, gold, soft and sticky. Fry the bread. Now you have October: chewier, drier, streaked with browns. The day in question fell somewhere in the middle of the french toast process.

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
... to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on heaven is to create hell.

Tom Robbins
The moon invented natural rhythm. Civilization uninvented it.

Tom Robbins
It couldn't have been Pan's output alone because Alobar's testicles were as flat and juiceless as trampled grapes.

Tom Robbins
Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked.

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

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

Tom Robbins
Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.

Tom Robbins
Except in the areas of civil rights and medical marijuana, the legacy of the sixties counterculture has been largely superficial. Still, though the light has dimmed and gone underground, something in me would like to think the sixties phenomenon was a dress rehearsal for a grander, wider leap in consciousness yet to come. However, since Seafood Kabob is likely to win the Belmont Stakes before a psychic jailbreak of that magnitude materializes, my strategy is to try to live as if that day were already here.

Tom Robbins
Conservatives understand Halloween, liberals only understand Christmas. If you want to control a population, don't give it social services, give it a scary adversary.

Tom Robbins