Tom Robbins Quotes

296 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Robbins
If kissing is man's greatest invention, then fermentation and patriarchy compete with the domestication of animals for the distinction of being man's worst folly, and no doubt the three combined long ago, the one growing out of the others, to foster civilization and lead Western humanity to its present state of decline.

Tom Robbins
You wonder if God doesn't have an answering machine to screen out the prayers of the venal and the boring? And in which category has he placed you?

Tom Robbins
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
The scientist keeps the romantic honest, and the romantic keeps the scientist human.

Tom Robbins
The odor of frying bacon, sausage links, and ham tiptoed on little pig feet all the way to the north end of the second floor. Inevitably, the odor made her simultaneously ravenous and nauseated. She hated the sensation. It reminded her of pregnancy. Every Sunday morning, Leigh-Cheri awoke to a pan of fried fear.

Tom Robbins
A lot of progress was being made there at MIT. Those guys had molecules jumping through hoops like poodles in a circus.

Tom Robbins
One tended to lose one's bearings in the presence of willful and persistent acts of craziness, and the more gentle the act, the crazier it seemed, as if rage and violence, being closer to the norm, were easier to accommodate.

Tom Robbins
The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy.

Tom Robbins
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
Curiosity, especially intellectual inquisitiveness, is what separates the truly alive from those who are merely going through the motions.

Tom Robbins
I cannot believe that the most delicious things were placed here merely to test us, to temp us, to make it the more difficult for us to capture the grand prize: the safety of the void. To fashion of life such a petty game is unworthy of both men and gods.

Tom Robbins
The fact is, what I hated in the Church was what I hated in society. Namely, authoritarians. Power freaks. Rigid dogmatists. Those greedy, underloved, undersexed twits who want to run everything. While the rest of us are busy living - busy tasting and testing and hugging and kissing and goofing and growing - they are busy taking over.

Tom Robbins
Let me see if I can put it in words that even the inebriated might understand.

Tom Robbins
Night, when tangos play on the nurse's radio and rat poison sings its own hot song behind the cellar door. Night, when the long snake feeds, when the black sedan cruises the pleasure districts, when neon flickers "Free at Last" in a dozen lost languages, and shapes left over from childhood move furtively behind the moon-dizzy boughs of the fir.

Tom Robbins
Zippers are primal and modern at the very same time. On the one hand, your zipper is primitive and reptilian, on the other, mechanical and slick. A zipper is where the Industrial Revolution meets the Cobra Cult.

Tom Robbins
She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obscured the already vague circumstances of its origins.

Tom Robbins
The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine's Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's Day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed.

Tom Robbins