Tom Robbins - Another Roadside Attraction (1971)

21 Sourced Quotes

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The function of the artist is to provide what life does not.

Tom Robbins
From the air, Vatican City looked like a marble Monopoly set. The Church owned all the property from Broadwalk to Illinois Avenue, has three hotels on every lot, and no matter how often it tossed the dice you just knew it would never land on Go to Jail, it would be forever passing Go and collecting $200.

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
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
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
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 were no mail-order catalogues in 1492. Marco Polo's journal was the wish book of Renaissance Europe. Then, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and landed in Sears' basement. Despite all the Indians on the escalator, Columbus' visit came to be known as a "discovery.

Tom Robbins
I travel in gardens and bedrooms, basements and attics, around corners, through doorways and windows, along sidewalks, over carpets, down drainpipes, in the sky, with friends, lovers, children and heros; perceived, remembered, imagined, distorted and clarified.

Tom Robbins
Much scientific truth proved to be as hypothetical as poetic allegory. The relationshiip of those rod-connected blue and red balls to an actual atomic structure was about the same as the relationship of Christianity to the fish or the Lamb.

Tom Robbins
And it rained a fever. And it rained a silence. And it rained a sacrifice. And it rained a miracle. And it rained sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem.

Tom Robbins
In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable.

Tom Robbins
There is no such thing as a weird human being. It's just that some people require more understanding than others.

Tom Robbins
We say we are earthlings, not waterlings. Our blood is closer to seawater than our bones to soil, but thats no matter. The sea is the cradle we all rocked out of, but its to dust that we go. From the time that water invented us, we began to seek out dirt. The further we separate ourselves from the dirt, the further we separate ourselves from ourselves. Alienation is a disease of the unsoiled.

Tom Robbins
Logic only gives man what he needs. Magic gives him what he wants.

Tom Robbins
The only meat in the world sweeter, hotter, and pinker than Amanda's twat is Carolina barbecue.

Tom Robbins
Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective.

Tom Robbins
When a man confines an animal in a cage, he assumes ownership of that animal. But an animal is an individual; it cannot be owned. When a man tries to own an individual, whether that individual be another man, an animal or even a tree, he suffers the psychic consequences of an unnatural act.

Tom Robbins
This did not annoy Amanda for it had long been her theory that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.

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
And it rained a screaming. And it rained a rawness. And it rained a plasma. And it rained a disorder.

Tom Robbins