Tom Robbins Quotes

296 Sourced Quotes

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
Of the seven deadly sins, lust is definitely the pick of the litter.

Tom Robbins
The most important thing in life is style. That is, the style of ones existence-the characteristic mode of ones actions-is basically, ultimately what matters. For if man defines himself by doing, then style is doubly definitive, because style describes the doing.

Tom Robbins
But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity's a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation.

Tom Robbins
They were old enough to know better. Some of them were old enough to remember when old Macdonald had a farm.

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
Nostalgia's nice enough in little bitty doses, it puts personal peach fuzz on the hard ass of history.

Tom Robbins
... overdramatizing the word of God, turning the Scriptures into a cross between a German opera and a hockey game.

Tom Robbins
What is it that separates human beings from the so called lower animals? Well as I see it, it's exactly one half dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism-as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glow-worms or raccoons-Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake. Now, since those are the features that define a human being, it follows that the extent to which someone is lacking in those qualities is the extent to which he or she is less than human. Capisce?

Tom Robbins
Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the Sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realised its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness.

Tom Robbins
You don't have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House.

Tom Robbins
Twenty candles on a cake. Twenty Camels in a pack. Twenty months in the federal pen. Twenty shots of tequila down a young girl's gullet. Twenty centuries since Our Lord's last pratfall, and after all that time we still don't know where passion goes when it goes.

Tom Robbins
If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.

Tom Robbins
There are essential and inessential insanities. The latter are solar in character, the former are linked to the moon. Inessential insanities are a brittle amalgamation of ambition, aggression, and pre-adolescent anxiety — garbage that should have been dumped long ago. Essential insanities are those impulses one instinctively senses are virtuous and correct, even though peers may regard them as coo-coo. Inessential insanities get one in trouble with one's self. Essential insanities get one in trouble with others. In fact, it may be essential. Poetry, the best of it, is lunar and is concerned with the essential insanities. Journalism is solar... and is devoted to the inessential.

Tom Robbins
Leave me in the night but please don't leave me in the dark

Tom Robbins
There's probably no subject with quite so many conflictin' opinions about it as there are about food, and 'tis better to swap bubble gum with a rabid bulldog than challenge a single one o' the varyin' beliefs your average human holds about nutrition.

Tom Robbins
The shaman lives outside the social system, refusing to have any part of it. Yet he seems to connect the populace to the heavens and the earth far more directly than the priest.

Tom Robbins
They glared at her the way any intelligent persons ought to glare when what they need is a smoke, a bite, a cup of coffee, a piece of ass, or a good fast-paced story, and all they're getting is philosophy.

Tom Robbins
Watts published a luminous book entitled The Wisdom of Insecurity that ought to be required reading for every high school senior. Watts elaborates beautifully on what I've learned from observation and personal experience: namely, that security is an illusion.

Tom Robbins
She lunched on papaya poo poo or mango mu mu or some other fruity foo foo bursting with overripe tropical vowels.

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

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

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

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

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
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
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