Quotes from Tom Robbins

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.

The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.

the greatest men that ever live pass away unknown. they put forth no claims for themselves, establish no schools of systems in their name. they never create or stir but just melt down into love

You have taught us much. Come with us and join the movement. This movement of yours, does it have slogans? inquired the Chink. Right on! they cried. And they quoted him some. Your movement, does it have a flag? asked the Chink. You bet! and they described their emblem. And does your movement have leaders? Great leaders. Then shove it up your butts, said the Chink. I have taught you nothing.

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

The ugly may be beautiful, the pretty never.

A sneeze travels at a peak velocity of two hundred miles per hour. A burp, more slowly; a fart, slower yet. But a kiss thrown by fingers- its departure is sudden, its arrival ambiguous, and there is no source that can state with authority what speeds are reached in its flight.

She did know that once tattooed one could no longer expect to lie for all eternity in an orthodox Jewish cemetery. They wouldn't even bury women with pierced ears. A strange theory of mutilation from the people who invented cutting the skin off the pee-pee.

Why, Tanuki grumbled, would they fell trees but leave men standing? Trees are a damn sight more useful than people, and everything in the world knows that but people.

not a fighter… an adventurer. He doesn't attack, he engages; He doesn't defend, he expands; He doesn't destroy, he transforms; He doesn't reject, he explores; ….

To an artist a metaphor is as real as a dollar.

we've produced a generation of spiritual panhandlers, begging for coins of wisdom, banging like bums on every closed door...if an old man moves into a shack or a cave and lets his beard grow, people will flock from miles around just to read his no trespassing sign

If you want to change the world, change yourself.

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.

The party in Alobar's head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: existence can be rearranged.

The oyster was an animal worthy of New Orleans, as mysterious and private and beautiful as the city itself. If one could accept that oysters build their houses out of their lives, one could imagine the same of New Orleans, whose houses were similarly and resolutely shuttered against an outside world that could never be trusted to show proper sensitivity toward the oozing delicacies within.

White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermingling of cultures unheard of in any other American city, South or North; although there has prevailed a most joyous and fascinating interface, black anger and white fear has persisted, providing the ongoing, ostensibly integrated fete champetre with volatile and sometimes violent idiosyncrasies.

What mattered to Abu was the music of the sentence. 'A shadow does not belong to the object that casts it.' To Abu, it was a little poem. And in general, it was the poetics, the music of things that tossed his confetti.

logic limits love, which may be why Descartes never married.

Science gives man what he needs. But magic gives him what he wants.

You are an ignorant schoolgirl. You think civilization is a good thing.

There were no mail-order catalogues in 1492. Marco Polo's journal was the wish book of Renaissance Europe. Then, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and landed in Sears' basement. Despite all the Indians on the escalator, Columbus' visit came to be known as a discovery.

Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.

I have learned something that many women these days never learn: Prince Charming really is a toad. And the beautiful Princess has halitosis. The bottom line is that a) people are never perfect, but love can be, b) that is the one and only way that they mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and c) doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love. Wouldn't that be the way to make love stay?