Tom Robbins Quotes - Page 12

Quotes about:

• Bland writing - timid, antiseptic, vanilla writing - is nearly as unhealthy as the brutal and dark. Instead of sipping, say, elixir, nectar, tequila, or champagne, the reader is invited to slurp lumpy milk or choke on the author's dust bunnies.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, Dark, Dust

  "The Syntax of Sorcery: An Interview with Tom Robbins". Interview with Tony Vigorito, realitysandwich.com. June 6, 2012.

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• 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.

  Tom Robbins

  Mean, Blue, Magic

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• When life demands more of people than they demand of life - as is ordinarily the case - what results is a resentment of life almost as deep-seated as the fear of death

  Tom Robbins

  Frustration, People, Demand

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• 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.

  Tom Robbins

  Beer, Lunch, Dancing

  "Jitterbug Perfume". Book by Tom Robbins, 1984.

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• Actually, there are countless ways to live upon this tremorous sphere in mirth and good health, and probably only one way - the industrial, urbanized, herding way - to live here stupidly, and man has hit upon that one way.

  Tom Robbins

  Men, Way To Live, Mirth

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• Outlaws, like lovers, poets, and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon.

  Tom Robbins

  Moon, Keys, Blood

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Still Life with Woodpecker”, p.58, Bantam

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• To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese.

  Tom Robbins

  Laughter, Rain, Ignorance

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• America is a nation of 270 million people: 100 million of them are gangsters, another 100 million are hustlers, 50 million are complete lunatics, and every single one of us is secretly in show business. Isn't that fabulous?

  Tom Robbins

  Funny, Humorous, America

  Tom Robbins (2006). “Wild Ducks Flying Backward”, p.187, Bantam

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• Human beings were not well served by permanence or stasis. Obviously, if individuals were progressing, they were undergoing a series of presumably desirable alterations, but in a universe where flux is fundamental, it can be argued that even change for the worse is preferable to no change at all. Isn't fixity the hallmark of the living dead?.

  Tom Robbins

  Progress, Fundamentals, Evolution

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates”, p.69, Bantam

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• Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical. If there's any one word -- if you had to pick one word to describe the nature of the universe -- I think that word would be paradox. That's true at the subatomic level, right through sociological, psychological, philosophical levels on up to cosmic levels.

  Tom Robbins

  Philosophical, Reality, Thinking

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• The universe does not have laws. It has habits. And habits can be broken.

  Tom Robbins

  Law, Broken, Doe

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Jitterbug Perfume”, p.312, Bantam

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• Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing.

  Tom Robbins

  Psychics, Data, Challenges

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• The theme of corporate stories (and millions drink them in every day) seldom varies: to be happy you must consume, to be special you must conform. Absurd, obviously, yet our identities have become so fragile, so elusive, that we seem content to let advertisers provide us with their version of who we are, to let them recreate us in their image: a cookie-cutter image based on market research, shallow sociology, and insidious lies.

  Tom Robbins

  Lying, Special You, Identity

  "(Revisiting) The Syntax of Sorcery: An Interview with Tom Robbins". Interview with Tony Vigorito, realitysandwich.com. May 9, 2014.

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• 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.

  Tom Robbins

  Running, Personality, Arbitrary

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• I'll follow him to the ends of the earth,' she sobbed. Yes, darling. But the earth doesn't have any ends. Columbus fixed that.

  Tom Robbins

  Earth, Woodpeckers, Columbus

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Still Life with Woodpecker”, p.122, Bantam

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• The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, Heart, Creating

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

  Tom Robbins

  Real, Artist, Dollars

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Another Roadside Attraction”, p.345, Bantam

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• I'm probably more interested in sentences than anything else in life.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, Sentences

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• Usually, autobiography is such an indulgence of the ego.

  Tom Robbins

  Ego, Autobiography, Indulgence

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• Unfortunately, little darlings, there is no such thing as a simple love story.The most transitory puppy crush is complex to the extent of lying beyond the far reaches of the brain's understanding.

  Tom Robbins

  Crush, Lying, Simple

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”, p.81, Bantam

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• The Earth is God's pinball machine and each quake, tidal wave, flash flood and volcanic eruption is the result of a TILT that occurs when God, cheating, tries to win free games.

  Tom Robbins

  Cheating, Winning, Games

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”, p.226, Bantam

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• The word desire suggests that there is something we do not have. If we have everything already, then there can be no desire, for there is nothing left to want. I think that what the Buddha may have been trying to tell us is that we have it all, each of us, all the time; therefore, desire is simply unnecessary.

  Tom Robbins

  Buddhist, Thinking, Desire

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Jitterbug Perfume”, p.129, Bantam

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• If complexity doesn't beat you, paradox will.

  Tom Robbins

  Paradox, Beats, Complexity

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• My desire was no less than before, you understand, but I no longer identified with the desire. Perhaps that is why taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of those desires.

  Tom Robbins

  Disappointment, Desire, Climate

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Jitterbug Perfume”, p.132, Bantam

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• Western civilization was declining too fast for comfort, but too slowly to be very exciting.

  Tom Robbins

  Civilization, Comfort, Exciting

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