Tom Robbins - Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

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I'm not quite twenty, but, thanks to you, I've learned something that many women these days never learn: Prince Charming really is a toad. And the Beautiful Princess has halitosis. The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love. Wouldn't that be the way to make love stay?

Tom Robbins
We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.

Tom Robbins
Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

Tom Robbins
I'll never write another novel on an electric typewriter. I'd rather use a sharp stick and a little pile of dogshit.

Tom Robbins
As any car freak will tell you, the old models are the most beautiful, even if they aren't the most efficient. People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve.

Tom Robbins
He looked at her with that kind of painted-on seriousness that comedians shift into when they get their chance to play Hamlet.

Tom Robbins
A better world has gotta start somewhere. Why not with you and me?

Tom Robbins
Life is like a stew, you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the top.

Tom Robbins
"This is the way to burn," the fuse seemed to be saying to the more docile, slow-witted candlewick. "Brilliantly, ecstatically, irrepressibly. This is the way to burn."

Tom Robbins
Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words make and stay become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.

Tom Robbins
There is a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like a part of the act.

Tom Robbins
The moon invented natural rhythm. Civilization uninvented it.

Tom Robbins
Something has got to hold it together. I'm saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue.

Tom Robbins
The man and woman firmly shook hands. The solution to the overpopulation problem might rest in such handshakes.

Tom Robbins
Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.

Tom Robbins
There are two kinds of people in this world : those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.

Tom Robbins
Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning or an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that question is: "Who knows how to make love stay?".

Tom Robbins
When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on — series polygamy — until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimension to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.

Tom Robbins
Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death.

Tom Robbins
A rabbi's dog could score pork chops in the streets of Tel Aviv easier than Bernard could acquire tequila in King County Jail.

Tom Robbins
I sense that novel of my dreams is in the Remington SL3 — although it writes much faster than I can spell.

Tom Robbins
Bernard Mickey Wrangle had developed a psychological test of his own. It was short, simple, and infallible. To administer the test, merely ask the subject to name his or her favorite Beatle. If you are at all familiar with the distinct separate public images of the four Beatles, then you'll recognize that the one chosen reveals as much about the subject's personality as most of us will ever hope to know.

Tom Robbins
Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us.

Tom Robbins
Twenty candles on a cake. Twenty Camels in a pack. Twenty months in the federal pen. Twenty shots of tequila down a young girl's gullet. Twenty centuries since Our Lord's last pratfall, and after all that time we still don't know where passion goes when it goes.

Tom Robbins
If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.

Tom Robbins
There are essential and inessential insanities. The latter are solar in character, the former are linked to the moon. Inessential insanities are a brittle amalgamation of ambition, aggression, and pre-adolescent anxiety — garbage that should have been dumped long ago. Essential insanities are those impulses one instinctively senses are virtuous and correct, even though peers may regard them as coo-coo. Inessential insanities get one in trouble with one's self. Essential insanities get one in trouble with others. In fact, it may be essential. Poetry, the best of it, is lunar and is concerned with the essential insanities. Journalism is solar... and is devoted to the inessential.

Tom Robbins
They glared at her the way any intelligent persons ought to glare when what they need is a smoke, a bite, a cup of coffee, a piece of ass, or a good fast-paced story, and all they're getting is philosophy.

Tom Robbins
She lunched on papaya poo poo or mango mu mu or some other fruity foo foo bursting with overripe tropical vowels.

Tom Robbins
The odor of frying bacon, sausage links, and ham tiptoed on little pig feet all the way to the north end of the second floor. Inevitably, the odor made her simultaneously ravenous and nauseated. She hated the sensation. It reminded her of pregnancy. Every Sunday morning, Leigh-Cheri awoke to a pan of fried fear.

Tom Robbins
We all dream profusely every night, yet by morning we've forgotten ninety percent of what went on. That's why poets are such important members of society. Poets remember our dreams for us.

Tom Robbins