Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

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Well, there's one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich.

Tom Robbins
Modern Romans insisted that there was only one god, a notion that struck Alobar as comically simplistic.

Tom Robbins
Zippers are primal and modern at the very same time. On the one hand, your zipper is primitive and reptilian, on the other, mechanical and slick. A zipper is where the Industrial Revolution meets the Cobra Cult.

Tom Robbins
Let me see if I can put it in words that even the inebriated might understand.

Tom Robbins
To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

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

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

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
Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

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
The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent, not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Tom Robbins
There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in domination, and we are all secretly attracted to violence.

Tom Robbins
The word desire suggests that there is something we do not have. If we have everything already, then there can be no desire, for there is nothing left to want. I think that what the Buddha may have been trying to tell us is that we have it all, each of us, all the time; therefore, desire is simply unnecessary.

Tom Robbins
At birth, we emerge from dream soup. At death, we sink back into dream soup. In between soups, there is a crossing of dry land. Life is a portage.

Tom Robbins
... the natural process of aging, which according to Dr. Wiggs Dannyboy, is so unnaturally cruel that only man could have ordained it — neither nature nor God would stoop so low.

Tom Robbins
There are apparently few limitations either of time or space on where the psyche might journey and only the customs inspector employed by our own inhibitions restricts what it might bring back when it reenters the home country of everyday consciousness.

Tom Robbins
They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning.

Tom Robbins
Water! Of all liquids on Earth, the only one chosen for scrubbin' and flushin'. The liquid they rinse baby's nappies in, the fluid that floods the gutters o' this cloud-squeezer town; a single drop o' water discolors a glass of Irish, and you, false friend, are wantin' me to pour this abrasive substance into me defenseless body!

Tom Robbins
If you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropiate port you find yourself docked.

Tom Robbins
The universe does not have laws. It has habits. And habits can be broken.

Tom Robbins
Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good. Moreover, a lout thrashing about in the clear waters of wisdom will dirty those waters for everyone else.

Tom Robbins
Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means.

Tom Robbins
It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful...

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
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
Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked.

Tom Robbins