Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976)

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True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.

Tom Robbins
Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it.

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

Tom Robbins
How we shape our understanding of others' lives is determined by what we find memorable in them, and that in turn is determined not by any potentially accurate overview of another's personality but rather by the tension and balance that exist in our daily relationships.

Tom Robbins
Whatever goes wrong can be used to your advantage, providing it goes wrong enough.

Tom Robbins
Plans are one thing and fate another. When they coincide, success results. Yet success mustn't be considered the absolute. It is questionable, for that matter, whether success is an adequate response to life. Success can eliminate as many options as failure.

Tom Robbins
Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.

Tom Robbins
If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill-take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edges of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic.

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
Fire is the reuniting of matter with oxygen. If one bears that in mind, every blaze may be seen as a reunion, an occasion of chemical joy.

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
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
Purpose! Purposes are for animals with a hell of a lot more dignity than the human race! Just hop on that strange torpedo and ride it to wherever it's going.

Tom Robbins
But the center can be a harmful place for one who has lived so long on the edge.... Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.

Tom Robbins
Those same forces that drive a genius to create the things or ideas that entertain or enlighten us often gobble so much of his personality that he has none left for the social graces.

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
Our Moon has surrendered none of its soft charm to technology. The pitter-patter of little spaceboots has in no way diminished its mystery.

Tom Robbins
The very act of creation requires such focused concentration that vast areas of knowledge may be completely overlooked. Well, so what? There is no evidence that generalized skills are in any way superior to specialized brilliance.

Tom Robbins
It is as if the soul of the continent is weeping. Why does it weep? It weeps for the bones of the buffalo. It weeps for magic that has been forgotten. It weeps for the decline of poets.It weepsfor the black people who think like white people.It weepsfor the Indians who think like settlers.It weepsfor the children who think like adults.It weepsfor the free who think like prisoners.Most of all, it weepsfor the cowgirls who think like cowboys.

Tom Robbins
Actually, there are countless ways to live upon this tremorous sphere in mirth and good health, and probably only one way - the industrial, urbanized, herding way - to live here stupidly, and man has hit upon that one way.

Tom Robbins
Certainly that sputterless little candleflame of the mediocre mind known as 'common sense' has never produced anything worth celebrating.

Tom Robbins
You are an ignorant schoolgirl. You think civilization is a good thing.

Tom Robbins
One has not only an ability to perceive the world but an ability to alter one's perception of it; more simply, one can change things by the manner in which one looks at them.

Tom Robbins
The Earth is God's pinball machine and each quake, tidal wave, flash flood and volcanic eruption is the result of a TILT that occurs when God, cheating, tries to win free games.

Tom Robbins
If little else, the brain is an educational toy. While it may be a frustrating plaything — one whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them — it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled; you don't have to put it together on Christmas morning.

Tom Robbins
A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves - all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.

Tom Robbins
People aren't trees, so it is false when they speak of roots.

Tom Robbins
Of course I'm inconsistent! Only logicians and cretins are consistent!

Tom Robbins
When life demands more of people than they demand of life - as is ordinarily the case - what results is a resentment of life almost as deep-seated as the fear of death

Tom Robbins
Sometimes those things that attract the most attention to us are the things that afford us the greatest privacy.

Tom Robbins