Tom Robbins Quotes

296 Sourced Quotes

Religion is a paramount contributor to human misery. It is not merely the opium of the masses, it is the cyanide.

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
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
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
Salvador Dali and fifty cents will get you a cup of clock melt.

Tom Robbins
Growing up is a trap," snapped Dr. Robbins. "When they tell you to shut up, they mean stop talking. When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. Reach a nice level plateau and settle there, predictable and unchanging, no longer a threat.

Tom Robbins
There are landscapes in which we feel above us not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed, is seen, although in such settings the sky is invariably immense. There is a place between the cerebrum and the stars where sky stops and space commenses, and should we find ourselves on a particular prairie or mountaintop at a particular hour [...] our relationship with sky thins and loosens while our connection with space becomes as solid as bone.

Tom Robbins
The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature.

Tom Robbins
Love is something to be passed around freely, not spooned down someone's throat for their own good by a Jewish grandmother who cooked it all by herself.

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

Tom Robbins
Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.

Tom Robbins
Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have known all along that it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.

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