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Tom Robbins -
Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)
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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
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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
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She lunched on papaya poo poo or mango mu mu or some other fruity foo foo bursting with overripe tropical vowels.
Tom Robbins
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Her surname resembled a line from an optometrist's examination chart.
Tom Robbins
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Sharks are the criminals of the sea. Dolphins are the outlaws.
Tom Robbins
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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
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Almost any object, including this book you hold, can turn up as Exhibit A in a murder trial.
Tom Robbins
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"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
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Any half-awake materialist well knows — that which you hold holds you.
Tom Robbins
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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.
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There's no point in saving the world if it means losing the moon.
Tom Robbins
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If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done.
Tom Robbins
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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
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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
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The first time that she spread her legs for him it had been like opening her jaws for the dentist.
Tom Robbins
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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
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Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.
Tom Robbins
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There are only two mantras... yum and yuk. Mine is yum.
Tom Robbins
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Quote of the day
Joy is like restless day; but peace divine Like quiet night; Lead me, O Lord, — till perfect Day shall shine Through Peace to Light.
Adelaide Anne Procter
Tom Robbins
Creative Commons
Born:
July 22, 1932
(age 91)
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