Quotes from Tom Robbins

Breathe properly. Stay curious. And eat your beets.

Something has got to hold it together. I'm saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue.

Death is simple. Life is messy. Give me life, the more complicated the better.

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.

When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.

If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.

It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful...

As a child, I was an imaginary playmate.

Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses.

Hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you're brown, you'll find out you're blue. As blue as indigo. And you know what that means. Indigo. Indigoing. Indigone.

Among our egocentric sad-sacks, despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation.

Ellen Cherry was from the south and had good manners. She didn´t have any panties on, but she had good manners.

It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful, like the flowers, than large, conservative, repressed, fearful, and aggressive, like the thunder lizards; a lesson, by the way, that the Earth has yet to learn.

When humans were young, they were pushed around in strollers. When they were old, they were pushed around in wheelchairs. In between, they were just pushed around.

We're making it up. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.

To live fully, one must be free, but to be free one must give up security. Therefore, to live one must be ready to die. How's that for a paradox?

Growing up is a trap, snapped Dr. Robbins. When they tell you to shut up, they mean stop talking. When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. Reach a nice level plateau and settle there, predictable and unchanging, no longer a threat.

There's no point in saving the world if it means losing the moon.

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.

The function of the artist is to provide what life does not.

The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine's Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's Day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed.

Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have known all along that it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.

Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked.

The fact is, what I hated in the Church was what I hated in society. Namely, authoritarians. Power freaks. Rigid dogmatists. Those greedy, underloved, undersexed twits who want to run everything. While the rest of us are busy living - busy tasting and testing and hugging and kissing and goofing and growing - they are busy taking over.