Tom Robbins Quotes

296 Sourced Quotes

A rabbi's dog could score pork chops in the streets of Tel Aviv easier than Bernard could acquire tequila in King County Jail.

Tom Robbins
I'm acquainted with a, uh, gentleman who claims that the extent to which a society focuses on the needs of its lowest common denominator is the extent to which that society'll be mired in mediocrity. Whereas, if we would aim the bulk of our support at the brightest, most talented, most virtuous instead, then they would have the wherewithal to solve a lot of our problems, to uplift the whole culture, enlighten it or something, so that eventually there wouldn't be so many losers and weaklings impeding evolution and dragging the whole species down. He claims that martyrs like you just perpetuate human misery by catering to it. He believes individuals have to take responsibility for their own lives and accept the consequences of their choices.

Tom Robbins
Accept that you're a pimple and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way lies grace — and maybe even glory.

Tom Robbins
I'm looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.

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

Tom Robbins
Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable.

Tom Robbins
Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.

Tom Robbins
It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful...

Tom Robbins
Life is too small a container for certain individuals.

Tom Robbins
Modern Romans insisted that there was only one god, a notion that struck Alobar as comically simplistic.

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
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
"Not naive," Conch Shell had corrected him, "He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear."

Tom Robbins
Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.

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
There are apparently few limitations either of time or space on where the psyche might journey and only the customs inspector employed by our own inhibitions restricts what it might bring back when it reenters the home country of everyday consciousness.

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

Tom Robbins
He glanced over his shoulder at her, regarding her, as he often did before they made love, as if she were a lost continent about to be rediscovered.

Tom Robbins
What we, thanks to Jung, call "synchronicity" (coincidence on steroids), Buddhists have long known as "the interpenetration of realities." Whether it's a natural law of sorts or simply evidence of mathematical inevitability (an infinite number of monkeys locked up with an infinite number of typewriters eventually producing Hamlet, not to mention Tarzan of the Apes), it seems to be as real as it is eerie.

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
The principal difference between an adventurer and a suicide is that the adventurer leaves himself a margin of escape (the narrower the margin the greater the adventure), a margin whose width and length may be determined by unknown factors but whose navigation is determined by the measure of the adventurer's nerve and wits. It is exhilarating to live by one's nerves or toward the summit of one's wits.

Tom Robbins
Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need.

Tom Robbins
Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished.

Tom Robbins
Switters was actually quite fond of Seattle's weather, and not merely because of it's ambivalence. He liked it's subtle, muted qualities and the landscape that those qualities encouraged if not engendered: vistas that seemed to have been sketched with a sumi brush dipped in quicksilver and green tea. It was fresh, it was clean, it was gently primal, and mystically suggestive.

Tom Robbins
Most snoring is composed by Beethoven or Wagner, although a few times Wiggs had heard heavy metal rock performed on the somnambulate bassoon.

Tom Robbins