Quotes from Tom Robbins

The theory arrived neither full-blown, like an orphan on the doorstep, nor sharply defined, like a spike through a shoe; nor did it develop as would a photographic print, crisp images gradually emerging from a shadowy soup. Rather, it unwound like a turban, like a mummy bandage; started with the sudden loosening of a clasp, a scarab fastener, and then unraveled in awkward spirals from end to frazzled end.

Romantic love is ambulatory by nature, and it must be anchored in strata more stable than lust if it's to last. Marital disintegration is accelerated when only one, or neither, party is grounded and growing, or growing at different rates or in different directions. As I became increasingly interested in cultural matters, matters of the mind and spirit, my teenage bride waxed more and more materialistic.

Pink is what red looks like when it kicks off its shoes and lets its hair down. -The Eight-Story Kiss

Maybe there is no proper way to react to the inner animal's tunes but dance to them.)

the Impressionists were able to lead the viewer into mixing color in his or her own eye.

Human societies have always defined themselves through narration, but nowadays corporations are telling man's stories for him.

Remember: no hand is a winning hand 'til you dare to lay it down. - Wild Card

And the message, no matter how entertainingly couched, is invariably the same: to be special, you must conform; to be happy, you must consume.

They say a story that begins with a beet will end with the devil; that is a risk we will have to take.

Ice cubes clink against the swizzle stick of your spinal column, and you start to wonder if this would not be the ideal moment to go home, take a hot shower, and curl up with a glass of chardonnay in front of a friendly computer.

What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.

I've long tended to regard the interruption of complacency as a kind of public service.

It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning.

Our religion, our party, our tribe, our town, our school, our race, our nation. Believe. Belong. Behave. Or Be damned.

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.

A myth, you ought to know, is a metaphoric method of describing, dramatizing, and condensing historical events and psychological states that are otherwise too complicated to be digested or appreciated by the prevailing society.

You're better equipped for this world than I am,' she said. 'I'm always trying to change the world. You know how to live in it.

Had Ken Kesey opened Electric Kool-Aid stands on every college campus in the country, it would have made a lesser contribution than Life to the creation of that era of unprecedented foment we like to call "the sixties.

The clown is a creature of chaos.

The secondary function of a bathroom mirror is to measure murmurs in mental mud.

Granny and me alone on Judgment Day and wonder if there is some wider meaning there, some cryptic message from a hidden dimension, from the Other, from the Over Self. Or if it was simply that heaven didn't want us and hell was afraid we'd take over.

Hemingway and Norman Mailer might have disagreed, but there is no heavyweight champion of literature.

The ones who're so upset about everybody not being the same, about competition, about standards of quality, about art objects having 'auras' around them, they're usually people with average abilities and average minds. And below average senses of humor.

She puckered her bubble gum mouth until its exaggerated sensuality drew attention away from the blood-blue crescents beneath her eyes. "My bags may be packed, but I haven't left town. No wonder Ricki finds me irresistible. She's only human." Leaning