Tom Robbins
88 quotes
Biography
Thomas Eugene Robbins was an American novelist. His most notable works are "seriocomedies".
"The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being."
"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."
"Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be trusted, but love does work; all things are possible; and we all could be happy and fulfilled if we only had the guts to be truly free and the wisdom to shrink our egos and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously."
"There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for."
"Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it in, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route."
"In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak."
"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."
"Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death."
"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."
"In the end, perhaps we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that's continually retold in an accent too thick and strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke my friends. The soul is the punch line."
"Our great human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain."
"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."
"Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival."
"salvation is for the feeble, that's what I think. I don't want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb."
"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."
"Faith is believing in something you know isn't true."
"If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done."
"Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard."
"Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good. Moreover, a lout thrashing about in the clear waters of wisdom will dirty those waters for everyone else."
"That's the way the mind works: the brain is genetically disposed towards organization, yet if not controlled, will link even the most imagerial fragment to another on the flimsiest pretense and in the most freewheeling manner, as if it takes a kind of organic pleasure in creative association, without regards to logic or chronological sequence."
"It is more important to be free than to be happy."
"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."
"I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man's primary problems aren't political; they're philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It's a cruel, repetitious bore."
"Personally, I prefer Stevie Wonder,"confessed the Chink, "but what the hell. Those cowgirls are always bitching because the only radio station in the area plays nothing but polkas, but I say you can dance to anything if you really feel like dancing."To prove it, he got up and danced to the news."
"It is questionable, for that matter, whether success is an adequate response to life. Success can eliminate as many options as failure."