Tom Robbins Quotes

We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.

To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.

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.

The beet is the most intense of vegetables

It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful.

The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.

The trickster's function is to break taboos, create mischief, stir things up.

In the end, the trickster gives people what they really want, some sort of freedom.

The beet is the most intense of vegetables.

The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent, not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully.

In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.

O tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate

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.

Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is sign on as its accomplice.

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.

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.

Eating a raw oyster is like french kissing a mermaid.

There are only two mantras, yum and yuck, mine is yum.

Breathe properly. Stay curious. And eat your beets.

True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced.

A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.

Our similarities bring us to a common ground;

Our differences allow us to be fascinated by each other.

When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free.

There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.

Throughout most of our history, nothing - not flood, famine, plague, or new weapons - has endangered humanity one-tenth as much as the narcissistic ego, with its self-aggrandizing presumptions and its hell-hound spawn of fear and greed.

Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.

We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.

Does koala bear poop smell like cough drops?

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.

Often, moreover, it is...that aspect of our being that society finds eccentric, ridiculous, or disagreeable, that holds our sweet waters, our secret well of happiness, the key to our equanimity in malevolent climes.

It's entirely possible to function as a free-thinking individual without succumbing to narcissism. This can be tricky at times, I suppose, but then so can the tango - particularly if you're dancing alone.

Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need.

There is no such thing as a weird human being, It's just that some people require more understanding than others.

But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity's a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation.

Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.

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

Love is dope, not chicken soup.

When I sit down to write, I just let the goose out of the bottle.

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

In fiction, when you paint yourself into a corner, you can write a pair of suction cups onto the bottoms of your shoes and walk up the wall and out the skylight and see the sun breaking through the clouds. In nonfiction, you don't have that luxury.

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

And it rained a fever. And it rained a silence. And it rained a sacrifice. And it rained a miracle. And it rained sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem.

The Earth is God's pinball machine and each quake, tidal wave, flash flood and volcanic eruption is the result of a TILT that occurs when God, cheating, tries to win free games.

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.

America is a nation of 270 million people: 100 million of them are gangsters, another 100 million are hustlers, 50 million are complete lunatics, and every single one of us is secretly in show business. Isn't that fabulous?

Of course I'm inconsistent! Only logicians and cretins are consistent!

Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them 'deadlines.'

What I’ve learned along the way is that existence is cosmic theatre, but paradoxically, we should play our roles to the absolute best of our ability while having the wisdom not to take them too seriously.

Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out.

Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is - and still not caring.