Quotes from Tom Robbins

The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best. They might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn't follow you home and park your car.

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.

If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it.

Every individual has to assume responsibility for his or her own actions, even the poor and the young. A social system that decrees otherwise is inviting intellectual atrophy and spiritual stagnation.

The Divine was beyond description, beyond knowing, beyond comprehension. To say that the Divine was Creation divided by Destruction was as close as one could come to definition. But the puny of soul, the dull of wit, weren't content with that. They wanted to hang a face on the Divine. They went so far as to attribute petty human emotions (anger, jealousy, etc) to it, not stopping to realize that if God were a being, even a supreme being, our prayers would have bored him to death long ago.

Perhaps that is why desire causes men calamity. By identifying with our desires and taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of those desires.

Summer had come to sit on New York's face.

It is more important to be free than to be happy.

Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.

Hard times and funky living can season the soul, true enough, but joy is the yeast that makes it rise.

Self-esteem is for sissies. Accept that you're a pimple and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way lies grace - and maybe even glory.

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.

The purpose of art is to provide what life does not.

This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper.

I'm an outlaw, not a philosopher, but I know this much: there's meaning in everything, all things are connected, and a good champagne is a drink.' Bernard began to sing again. Timidly, Leigh-Cheri joined in. Between verses, they opened another bottle. The popping of its cork echoed throughout the great stone chamber. Of the three billion people on earth, only Bernard and Leigh-Cheri heard the popping of the cork and its echoes. Only Bernard and Leigh-Cheri passed out under the tablecloth.

I travel in gardens and bedrooms, basements and attics, around corners, through doorways and windows, along sidewalks, over carpets, down drainpipes, in the sky, with friends, lovers, children and heros; perceived, remembered, imagined, distorted and clarified.

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.

People aren't trees, so it is false when they speak of roots.

All dreams continue in the beyond.

Salvador Dali and fifty cents will get you a cup of clock melt.

Dreamily the Princess stood up. I'm not sure if I can walk, she said. Then I'll carry you. 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.

She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obscured the already vague circumstances of its origins.

You knows dat in New Orleans is not morning 'til dee sun come up.

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'.