Tom Robbins Quotes

296 Sourced Quotes

Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.

Tom Robbins
Genius may stand on the shoulders of giants, but it stands alone.

Tom Robbins
They'd be no threat to me. I have a black belt in Haiku. And a black vest in the cleaners.

Tom Robbins
I'll bet I'm as old as you are." "I'm older than Sanskrit." "Well, I was waitress at the Last Supper." "I'm so old I remember when McDonald's had only sold a hundred burgers." "You win.

Tom Robbins
There is a sense in which a painted stick is a stick in bloom. This stick points to the hidden face of God. Sometimes it points to you.

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
My desire was no less than before, you understand, but I no longer identified with the desire. Perhaps that is why taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of those desires.

Tom Robbins
All animals copulate but only humans osculate. Parakeets rub beaks? Sure they do, but only little old ladies who murder schoolchildren with knitting needles to steal their lunch money so that they can buy fresh kidneys to feed overweight kitty cats would place bird billing in the realm of the true kiss.

Tom Robbins
I journey to the east, where I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners.

Tom Robbins
Comedy is deemed inferior to tragedy primarily because of the social prevalence of narcissistic pathology. In other words people who are too self important to laugh at their own frequently ridiculous behavior have vested interest in gravity because it supports their illusions of grandosity.

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

Tom Robbins
You should never hesitate to trade your cow for a handful of magic beans.

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
Things. Cosas. Things attach themselves like leeches to the human soul, then they bleed out the sweetness and the music and the primordial joy of being unencumbered upon the land.

Tom Robbins
People feel tremendous pressure to settle down in some sort of permanent space and fill it up with stuff, but deep inside they resent those structures, and they're scared to death of that stuff because they know it controls them and restricts their movements.

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

Tom Robbins
She tried out the chamber pot, although she really had nothing to contribute.

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
Ultimately, the roast turkey must be regarded as a monument to Boomer's love.

Tom Robbins
You may tell the greatest lies and wear a brilliant disguise, but you can't escape the eyes of the one who sees right through you.

Tom Robbins
Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning or an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that question is: "Who knows how to make love stay?".

Tom Robbins
But do we know how to make love stay?' I can't even think about it. The best I can do is play it day by day.

Tom Robbins
As any car freak will tell you, the old models are the most beautiful, even if they aren't the most efficient. People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve.

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
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
And what would our ideas of God, of religion, be like if they had come to us through the minds of women? Ever think of that?

Tom Robbins
Ellen Cherry was from the south and had good manners. She didn't have any panties on, but she had good manners.

Tom Robbins
The Devil doesn't make us do anything. The Devil, for example, doesn't make us mean. Rather, when we're mean, we make the Devil. Literally. Our actions create him. Conversely, when we behave with compassion, generosity, and grace, we create God in the world.

Tom Robbins
A better world has gotta start somewhere. Why not with you and me?

Tom Robbins
Life is like a stew, you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the top.

Tom Robbins