|
f75fe5d
|
although surely she realized that space is merely a device to prevent everything from being in the same spot.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
8cdbf19
|
Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver. In fact, the person who maintains absolute standards of good and evil usually is the maniac with the revolver.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
5924e3a
|
If you want your tree to produce plenty o' fruit, you've got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin'.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
1668c1f
|
What looks to be a wisp of cloud is actually the moon, narrow and pale like a paring snipped from a snowman's toenail.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
ab63d1d
|
Alas, Gulietta, this was an American frog of the last quarter of the twentieth century, a time when wishing apparently no longer led to anything, and Leigh-Cheri eventually named it Prince Charming after that son-of-a-bitch who never comes though.
|
|
woodpecker
still
with
|
Tom Robbins |
|
62f5d72
|
Yuruyebilecegimden emin degilim. -Oyleyse seni tasirim. -Ask bu mu? -Ask nedir, bilmiyorum artik. Bir hafta once pek cok fikrim vardi. Ask nedir, nasil kalici kilinir. Simdi asigim ve en ufak bir fikrim yok. Simdi asigim ve bu konuda bir aptaldan farkim yok. .... Dolunayin gerceklestigi gune, Ay'in ne buyudugu ne de kuculdugu gune, Babilliler "yurek dinlencesi" anlamina gelen Sabat adini vermislerdi. Bu gunde Ay tanricasinin, Babil'de b..
|
|
still-life-with-woodpecker
tom-robbins
|
Tom Robbins |
|
c195ca8
|
like two r's trapped in a spanish songbook, tilli and max lurked in their shoebox castle, waiting to be rolled.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
8fe3424
|
Hitchhiking is not a sport. It is not an art. It certainly isn't work, for it requires no particular ability not does it produce anything of value. It's an adventure, I suppose, but a shallow ignoble adventure.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
99c7b3c
|
Originality is a myth perpetuated by the naive, the romantic, and the unscrupulous.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
f1a3c81
|
If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It's a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved. To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybod..
|
|
living-life-to-the-fullest
|
–Tom Robbins from “You gotta have soul” Esquire October 1993 |
|
7b4f5ca
|
All things considered, I've learned more from talking to painters than talking to writers. Not that painters are smarter than writers, such is seldom the case, but in conversation writers are inclined to waste an inordinate amount of time either bragging or bellyaching about reviews and royalties, complaining about their publishers, or dissing other authors. Painters, being equally insecure, can likewise come across as boring and bitchy -- ..
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
0675c9a
|
the sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realized its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
b1f0b40
|
true freedom was an internal condition not subject to the vagaries of politics. Freedom could not be owned. Therefore, it could not be appropriated.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
c92cfb8
|
If desire causes suffering, it may be because we do not desire wisely, or that we are inexpert at obtaining what we desire. Instead of hiding our heads in a prayer cloth and building walls against temptation, why not get better at fulfilling desire? 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. If the gods would tax ecstasy, then I shall pay; however,..
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
4d2cc9e
|
even though the mind of humanity was ultimately one mind, still, each and every single individual had to establish his or her own special, personal, particular, unique, direct, one-on-one, hands-on relationship with reality, with the universe, with the Divine. It might be complicated, it might be a pain in the ass, it might be, most of all, lonely--but it was the bottom line.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
5fdb4ae
|
Oh, Marx,' Amanda sighed. 'You're so melodramatic. So what if it's this way or that way? When I was in convent school I used to stare out the windows at the clouds. I used to chase butterflies in the Mother Superior's flower patch. Those clouds and those butterflies, they didn't know secular from religious--and they didn't care.' 'I'm neither a cloud nor a butterlfy,' I snapped. 'We're all the same as clouds and butterflies. We just pretend..
|
|
humor
tom-robbins
clouds
butterflies
|
Tom Robbins |
|
9b52162
|
Love is private and primitive and a bit on the funky and frightening side. I think of the Luna card in the Tarot deck: some strange, huge crustacean, its armor glistening and its pinchers wiggling, clatters out of a pool while wild dogs howl at a bulging moon. Underneath the hearts and flowers, love is loony like that. Attempts to housebreak it, to refine it, to dress the crabs up like doves and make them sing soprano always result in thin ..
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
10b16bb
|
Can o'Beans was to remark that a comparison between the American Cowpoke and, say, the Japanese samurai, left the cowboy looking rather shoddy. 'Before a samurai went into battle,' Can o' Beans was to say, 'he would burn incense in his helmet so that if his enemy took his head, he would find it pleasant to his nose. Cowboys, on the other hand, hardly ever bathed or changed their crusty clothing. If a samurai's enemy lost his sword, the samu..
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
76aef7a
|
every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
c38daa5
|
But having acquired a taste for solitude, each of them spent days separate and alone, Leigh-Cheri in the attic, Bernard in the pantry. 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. To be unmasked, it has no choice.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
961957c
|
Alcoholism is an imperfect spiritual longing.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
9388c6b
|
Now, in the eyes of the stars, men may be no more exalted than beasts, and kingly men no worthier than the wretched.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
3ce33bf
|
Basically, the two churches are bound together much more intimately than most Christians think. Should the Roman Church fall, the Protestant churches won't rush in and fill the void. They will fall soon afterward. The Catholic express and the Protestant choo-choo are rolling on the same rails, and if the bridge washes out, both are destined for the gulch. In the long run, Protestants stand to lose as much from the mortality of Jesus as do t..
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
a1f781c
|
Is that what love is?" "I no longer know what love is. A week ago I had a lot of ideas. What love is and how to make it stay. 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 |
|
1bcb431
|
We, each of us, have a ticket to ride, and if the trip be interesting (if it's dull, we have only ourselves to blame), then we relish the landscape (how quickly it whizzes by!), interact with our fellow travelers, pay frequent visits to the washrooms and concession stands, and hardly ever hold up the ticket to the light where we can read its plainly stated destination: The Abyss.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
4d14995
|
They've built their nests in the chimneys of my heart: those swallows that you lost.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
593242a
|
But man by his nature is an unnatural animal. If any creature stands a chance of defeating death, it is man.
|
|
immortality
|
Tom Robbins |
|
7f3dbf5
|
What is it," Maestra had asked quite rhetorically, "that separates human beings from the so-called lower animals? Well, as I see it, it's exactly one half-dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism--as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glowworms or raccoons--Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake. "Now," she'd gone on to say, "since those are the features that def..
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
2d5ce6f
|
How different conditions would be today in the Middle East, how much saner and safer the entire earth might be, had those Christians not defiled a civilization too advanced for their arrogant little minds to understand.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
cfc6bd0
|
Those who willingly accept being conned are as corrupt as those who con them.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
a28ab9b
|
this lonely, uncompromising, obsessive tug-of-war with presumed reality, this is what art is all about.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
a1bf978
|
When we sleep on someone else's pillow, we sometimes find ourselves having that person's dreams. If a married couple switches sides of the bed, for example, he will have her dreams for a while and she will have his. Nothing of the sort occurs in a hotel bed, naturally, for the simple reason that no one person has slept there long enough to leave a psychic imprint. Is the connection to the bedding place or to the space below it? Perhaps we d..
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
1e9773f
|
I have hitched and hiked over every state and half the nations, through blizzards and under rainbows, in deserts and cities, backward and side-ways, upstairs, downstairs and in my lady's chamber.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
066f4cf
|
Now, my all-time favorite accolade from a book reviewer was when Fernanda Pivano, Italy's best-known critic, wrote in a leading Italian newspaper that "Tom Robbins is the most dangerous writer in the world." I never read my reviews, even in English, but others sometimes pass choice bits along, so when I had occasion to meet the legendary Signora Pivano at a reception in Milan, I asked her what she meant by that wonderfully flattering remark..
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
3d7b0ac
|
THE MINUTE YOU LAND IN NEW ORLEANS, something wet and dark leaps on you and starts humping you like a swamp dog in heat, and the only way to get the aspect of New Orleans off you is to eat it off.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
eebcf14
|
They coil around each other, the light and the darkness, and they absorb each other continuously, yet they never cancel each other out.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
46af579
|
I love myself," he said. "But it's unrequited."
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
da49292
|
that no matter how valid, how vital, one's belief system might be, one undermines that system and ultimately negates it when one gets rigid and dogmatic in one's adherence to it.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
e2fcb33
|
Men live by embedding themselves in ongoing systems of illusion. Religion. Patriotism. Economics. Fashion. That sort of thing.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
9aa1749
|
As long as there are fuses, no walls are safe. As long as every wall is threatened, the world can happen. Outlaws are can openers in the supermarket of life.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
ba29403
|
this is not the first time that intimidation by typewriter has caused me to consider the pen.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
85b6478
|
I like to drink just enough to change the temperature in the brain room. I'll turn to less mainstream substances if I want to rearrange the furniture.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |
|
3843450
|
That's the value of the artist... Even when they aren't aware, they're dreaming our dreams for us.
|
|
inspire
|
Tom Robbins |
|
ca9be36
|
To the domesticated, nomads were an unwelcome reminder of instinct suppressed, liberty compromised, and control unimplemented.
|
|
|
Tom Robbins |