Quotes from Tom Robbins

Bones are patient. Bones never tire nor do they run away. When you come upon a man who has been dead many years, his bones will still be lying there, in place, content, patiently waiting, but his flesh will have gotten up and left him. Water is like flesh. Water will not stand still. It is always off to somewhere else; restless, talkative, and curious. Even water in a covered jar will disappear in time. Flesh is water. Stones are like bones. Satisfied. Patient. Dependable.

The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought. So

But . . ." said Sissy. Sissy said "but" while sitting on her butt on a butte. The poetic possibilities of the English language are endless.

Street Crime is the only logical response to America's drug policy just as terrorism is the only logical response to America's foreign policy

This darling Marvelous has eaten at many tables and has not been nourished.

The accumulation of material things is shallow and vain, but to have a genuine relationship with such things is to have a relationship with life and, by extension, a relationship with the divine.

I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.

Only the obtuse are unappreciative of paradox.

Outside, the rains had come, the rains that like a blizzard of guppies would pelt the creaky old house until spring. There is no weeping that can compete with the northwest rains.

no amount of money could buy security, and if it could, it would be a bad bargain at any price, since security was a form of paralysis, just as satisfaction was a form of death;

Now I'd fallen into it like a drunk hobo falling into a vat of champagne.

it's hardly headline news that the corporate state and its media are using the latest gadget-com and gimmick-tech to dumb us down as steadily as if they were standing on a stool and pounding our brains with a frozen ham.

Surely there would be humidity and plenty of it in Hell. Hard to imagine a condemned sinner saying cheerfully, Well, yes, it's two hundred and sixty degrees down here, but it's a *dry* heat.

Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry that it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

Isn't fixity the hallmark of the living dead?

Criminals, because they're plagued with guilt, often will surrender and go quietly. Outlaws, because they're pure, never will.

There was a purity about him, a blaze in his eyes, that bordered on the charismatic. I also had the sense that hanging out with him would be dangerous: not because he might prove mean, violent, dishonest, or crazier than anybody else I knew, but because he seemed both completely uncompromised and completely uncompromising. As Henry Miller said of Rimbaud, he was "like a man who discovered electricity but knew absolutely nothing about insulation.

And did I lose my faith in raffles about the same time and for approximately the same reasons that I quit believing that virgins can have babies; or that if I slay only those people the government encourages me to slay, I'll be allowed to spend all of eternity in some vaguely located puffyland sipping milk and honey with a huzzahing throng of cheery nonthinkers?

Death is not a resident of the house. 'Death' is merely the name we give to certain rooms of the house, rooms that we, the so-called 'living,' fear for the simple reason that we have not passed through them.

Elsewhere, they might call the wind Mariah, but here its name was Something Fishy.

You know that I've always been proud of the way nature singled me out. It's the people who have been deformed by society that I feel sorry for. We can live with nature's experiments, and if they aren't too vile, turn them to our advantage. But social deformity is sneaky and invisible; it makes people into monsters – or mice.

So, the scholars are tedious, the experts never see the whole truth of things, still they have their role to play.

To practice a religion can be lovely, to believe in one is almost always disastrous.

As a result, our big "attic" room was a Hispanic gathering place. Afternoons, it was crowded with boys from Venezuela and Cuba, jabbering away in Spanish, the world's fastest language, seeming to all talk at once. It was like living in a cage full of parrots whose crackers had been laced with crystal meth. I found it agreeably colorful. For whatever reason, Brugál had not