Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

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

Tom Robbins
The oyster was an animal worthy of New Orleans, as mysterious and private and beautiful as the city itself. If one could accept that oysters build their houses out of their lives, one could imagine the same of New Orleans, whose houses were similarly and resolutely shuttered against an outside world that could never be trusted to show proper sensitivity toward the oozing delicacies within.

Tom Robbins
There are people in this world who can wear whale masks and people who cannot, and the wise know to which group they belong.

Tom Robbins
Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form o' self-indulgence.

Tom Robbins
The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being.

Tom Robbins
To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being.

Tom Robbins
A sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised.

Tom Robbins
If you didn't serve the nasty fellow (God), the Romans would burn your house down. If you did serve him, you were called a Christian and got to burn other people's houses down.

Tom Robbins
Salvation is for the feeble, that's what I think. I don't want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb.

Tom Robbins
She needed help, but God was in a meeting whenever she rang.

Tom Robbins
I do not know why the dead do not come back to life. Perhaps death is so wonderful, in ways we cannot comprehend, that they prefer it over and above their friends and loved ones, although I am inclined to doubt that be the case.

Tom Robbins
Above the building, the sky recalled passages from Les Miserables, threadbare and gray.

Tom Robbins
Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn't bother to wipe its boots.

Tom Robbins
Madame Lily Devalier always asked "Where are you?" in a way that insinuated that there were only two places on earth one could be: New Orleans and somewhere ridiculous.

Tom Robbins
My life is not merely a public phenomenon, it is a solitary adventure as well.

Tom Robbins
Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses.

Tom Robbins
My lunar sign is in Virgo. Every month when the moon is full, I'm driven to balance my checkbook and straighten up my apartment. I can't help myself. Instead of a werewolf I turn into an accountant.

Tom Robbins
The rich are the most discriminated-against minority in the world. Openly or covertly, everybody hates the rich because, openly or covertly, everybody envies the rich. Me, I love the rich. Somebody has to love them. Sure, a lot o' rich people are assholes, but believe me, a lot o' poor people are assholes, too, and an asshole with money can at least pay for his own drinks.

Tom Robbins
Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.

Tom Robbins
Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere - the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.

Tom Robbins
When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much.

Tom Robbins
He was becoming unstuck, he was sure of that - his bones were no longer wrapped in flesh but in clouds of dust, in hummingbirds, dragonflies, and luminous moths - but so perfect was his equilibrium that he felt no fear. He was vast, he was many, he was dynamic, he was eternal.

Tom Robbins
The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.

Tom Robbins
Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air — moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh — felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing.

Tom Robbins
I deserve to be chained by night in a church basement without company o' cassette player if I'm not man enough to ask you for the teeniest, slightest brush of oral-muscular affaction.

Tom Robbins
The party in Alobar's head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: existence can be rearranged.

Tom Robbins
Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.

Tom Robbins