Tom Robbins - Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

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A person's looking for a simple truth to live by, there it is. CHOICE. To refuse to passively accept what we've been handed by nature or society, but to choose for ourselves. CHOICE. That's the difference between emptiness and substance, between a life actually lived and a wimpy shadow cast on an office wall.

Tom Robbins
Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano. It's not the tobacco we're after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.

Tom Robbins
Leave it to a naive world-saver like you to view our love as a Sacred Cause when in actual fact all it was was some barking at the moon.

Tom Robbins
They snuggled closer, and when they were as close as they could get without being behind one another, they commenced to kiss again.

Tom Robbins
It's not men who limit women, it's not straights who limit gays, it's not whites who limit blacks. What limits people is lack of character. What limits people is that they don't have the fucking nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it.

Tom Robbins
Her surname resembled a line from an optometrist's examination chart.

Tom Robbins
Sharks are the criminals of the sea. Dolphins are the outlaws.

Tom Robbins
On the campus of Outlaw College, professors of essential insanities would characterize the conflicting attitudes of Nina Jablonski and Leigh-Cheri as indicative of a general conflict between social idealism and romanticism. As any of the learned professors would explain, plied with sufficient tequila, no matter how fervently a romantic might support a movement, he or she eventually must withdraw from active participation in that movement because the group ethic — the supremacy of the organization over the individual — is an affront to intimacy. Intimacy is the principal source of the sugars with which this life is sweetened. It is absolutely vital to the essential insanities.

Tom Robbins
Almost any object, including this book you hold, can turn up as Exhibit A in a murder trial.

Tom Robbins
"I'll follow him to the ends of the earth," she sobbed. Yes, darling. But the earth doesn't have any ends. Columbus fixed that.

Tom Robbins
Any half-awake materialist well knows — that which you hold holds you.

Tom Robbins
If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, acting lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, that's perfectly valid — but don't go out trying to sell your beliefs to the system. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself.

Tom Robbins
There's no point in saving the world if it means losing the moon.

Tom Robbins
If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done.

Tom Robbins
But do we know how to make love stay?' I can't even think about it. The best I can do is play it day by day.

Tom Robbins
Outlaws, like lovers, poets, and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon.

Tom Robbins
The first time that she spread her legs for him it had been like opening her jaws for the dentist.

Tom Robbins
This may be said for the last quarter of the twentieth century: the truism that if we want a better world we will have to be better people came to be acknowledge, if not thoroughly understood, by a significantly large minority.

Tom Robbins
Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.

Tom Robbins
There are only two mantras... yum and yuk. Mine is yum.

Tom Robbins
Now that I'm in love, I haven't a clue. Now that I'm in love, I'm completely stupid on the subject.

Tom Robbins
This stuff's so fine Julius Caesar called for it with his dying breath. 'A toot, Brutus,' is what he said.

Tom Robbins
What we have here is an unexpected touchdown on the runway of the heart.

Tom Robbins
Tequila, scorpion honey, harsh dew of the doglands, essence of Aztec, crema de cacti; tequila, oily and thermal like the sun in solution; tequila, liquid geometry of passion; Tequila, the buzzard God who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying virgins; tequila, firebug in the house of good taste; O tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate!

Tom Robbins
They'd be no threat to me. I have a black belt in Haiku. And a black vest in the cleaners.

Tom Robbins
I'll bet I'm as old as you are." "I'm older than Sanskrit." "Well, I was waitress at the Last Supper." "I'm so old I remember when McDonald's had only sold a hundred burgers." "You win.

Tom Robbins
She tried out the chamber pot, although she really had nothing to contribute.

Tom Robbins
This baby (the Remington SL3 typewriter) speaks electric Shakespeare at the slightest provocation and will rap out a page and a half if you just look at it hard.

Tom Robbins