Quotes from Tom Robbins

He was as nervous as a praying mantis at an atheists' picnic...

An old Ukrainian proverb warns, "A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil." That is a risk we have to take.

I began to hitchhike in something akin to geological time: slow, ancient, vast.

I love myself," he said. "But it's unrequited.

In the end, perhaps we should simply imagine joke; a long joke that's being continually retold in an accent too thick and too strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke, my friends. The soul is the punch line.

Whether I'm unduly sensitive to this pain because I'm a princess—could the whole world be the pea under my mattress?—I don't know, but because I'm a princess, I might be able to do something to help lessen humanity's pain.

To the domesticated, nomads were an unwelcome reminder of instinct suppressed, liberty compromised, and control unimplemented.

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.

She thought these thoughts to herself as in her mind's eye she ran naked through the woods, hugging trees.

I removed the freeway from its temporal context. Overpasses, cloverleafs, exit ramps took on the personality of Mayan ruins for me. Without destination, without cessation, my run was often silent and empty; there were no increments, no arbitrary graduations reducing time to functional units. I abstracted and purified.

People tend to take everything too seriously. Especially themselves.

Some folks hide, and some folks seek, and seeking, when it's mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous can be a form of hiding. But there are folks who want to know and aren't afraid to look and won't turn tail should they find it—and if they never do, they'll have a good time anyway because nothing, neither the terrible truth nor the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of earth's sweet gas.

Breath Properly, Stay Curious, and Always Eat Your Beets!

If you could buckle your Bugs Bunny wristwatch to a ray of light, your watch would continue ticking but the hands wouldn't move. That's because at the speed of light there is no time. Time is relative to velocity. At high speeds, time is literally stretched. Since light is the ultimate in velocity, at light-speed time is stretched to its absolute and becomes static. Albert Einstein figured that one out.

Those who shun the whimsy in life will experience rigormortis before death.

Now, in the eyes of the stars, men may be no more exalted than beasts, and kingly men no worthier than the wretched.

Originality is a myth perpetuated by the naive, the romantic, and the unscrupulous.

The theater of man is not always 'amusing', but it is always theater, and theater can be marveled at even when its content is somber and harsh. You're acquainted with Greek tragedy?

a sudden squawked command caused everyone within earshot to act for a split second as if they were shaking invisible martinis

Among the Haida Indians of the Pacific Northwest, the verb for making poetry is the same as the verb to breathe.

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.

The wind had its arms around them. The sea dandled them on its knee.

The king poured maple syrup on his waffle. The syrup puddled the depressions in the waffle the way that desire puddles the folds in the brain

Men live by embedding themselves in ongoing systems of illusion. Religion. Patriotism. Economics. Fashion. That sort of thing.