Tom Robbins - Skinny Legs and All (1990)

34 Sourced Quotes

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What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make others people's decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or at the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it must be levity.

Tom Robbins
Ellen Cherry was from the south and had good manners. She didn't have any panties on, but she had good manners.

Tom Robbins
Religion is a paramount contributor to human misery. It is not merely the opium of the masses, it is the cyanide.

Tom Robbins
Keep your eye on the ball, even if you cannot see the ball.

Tom Robbins
The winter passed as slowly and peacefully as a boa constrictor digesting a valium addict.

Tom Robbins
Rap music... sounds like somebody feeding a rhyming dictionary to a popcorn popper.

Tom Robbins
Dip a slice of bread in batter. That's September: yellow, gold, soft and sticky. Fry the bread. Now you have October: chewier, drier, streaked with browns. The day in question fell somewhere in the middle of the french toast process.

Tom Robbins
... to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on heaven is to create hell.

Tom Robbins
Conservatives understand Halloween, liberals only understand Christmas. If you want to control a population, don't give it social services, give it a scary adversary.

Tom Robbins
Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished.

Tom Robbins
The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves.

Tom Robbins
Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that's only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we're all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.

Tom Robbins
The trick is this: keep your eye on the ball. Even when you can't see the ball.

Tom Robbins
You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I've learned that it isn't necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It's a game, right? It's like being paid for dreaming.

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

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

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
When humans were young, they were pushed around in strollers. When they were old, they were pushed around in wheelchairs. In between, they were just pushed around.

Tom Robbins
Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver.

Tom Robbins
"Not naive," Conch Shell had corrected him, "He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear."

Tom Robbins
Early religions were like muddy ponds with lots of foliage. Concealed there, the fish of the soul could splash and feed. Eventually, however, religions became aquariums. Then hatcheries. From farm fingerling to frozen fish stick is a short swim.

Tom Robbins
A person can't make a career out of somebody else's invective.

Tom Robbins
We approach the divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains.

Tom Robbins
In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.

Tom Robbins
... she recreated the mountains not as she had originally seen them but as she eventually chose to perceive them, not only a capacity to observe the world but a capacity to alter his or her observation of it — which, in the end, is the capacity to alter the world, itself. Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call "sages," and those who act upon it, we call "artists."

Tom Robbins
The Divine was expansive, but religion was reductive. Religion attempted to reduce the Divine to a knowable quantity with which mortals might efficiently deal, to pigeonhole it once and for all so that we never had to reevaluate it. With hammers of cant and spikes of dogma, we crucified and crucified again, trying to nail to our stationary altars the migratory light of the world.

Tom Robbins
This is the room where Jezebel frescoed her eyelids with history's tragic glitter

Tom Robbins
And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe- and go on about our tasks

Tom Robbins
Of the Seven Dwarfs, the only one who shaved was Dopey. That should tell us something about the wisdom of shaving.

Tom Robbins
The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans' insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion.

Tom Robbins