Top 500 Tom Robbins Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Amanda became pregnant during a fierce thunderstorm. “Was it the lightning or the lover?” she was sometimes heard to muse. When her son was born with electrical eyes, people no longer thought her foolish.”

— Tom Robbins

152. “Words on a page can hypnotize you if the rhythm is right.”

— Tom Robbins

153. “It’s personal freedom, not hundred dollar bills that lights the soul’s cigar.”

— Tom Robbins

154. “The mission of the artist in an over-technologi zed society, is to call the old magic back to life.”

— Tom Robbins

155. “You don’t have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House.”

— Tom Robbins

156. “Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective.”

— Tom Robbins

157. “Once, in a spasm of sappiness, you asked Q-Jo if she thought your dreams would ever come true. ‘You aren’t talking about dreams,’ she corrected you, ’you’re referring to your pathetic bourgeoisie ambitions. Dreams don’t come true. Dreams are true.”

— Tom Robbins

158. “Dip a slice of bread in batter. That’s September: yellow, gold, soft and sticky. Fry the bread. Now you have October: chewier, drier, streaked with browns. The day in question fell somewhere in the middle of the french toast process.”

— Tom Robbins

159. “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.”

— Tom Robbins

160. “My faith is whatever makes me feel good about being alive. If your religion doesn’t make you feel good to be alive, what the hell is the point of it?”

— Tom Robbins

161. “Of course I’m inconsistent! Only logicians and cretins are consistent!”

— Tom Robbins

162. “What I’ve learned along the way is that existence is cosmic theatre, but paradoxically, we should play our roles to the absolute best of our ability while having the wisdom not to take them too seriously.”

— Tom Robbins

163. “They coil around each other, the light and the darkness, and they absorb each other continuously, yet they never cancel each other out.”

— Tom Robbins

164. “I would only read the novels that people classify as ‘beach books’ if I were being held prisoner and the only alternative was the ‘Book of Mormon.’”

— Tom Robbins

165. “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.”

— Tom Robbins

166. “Certainly that sputterless little candleflame of the mediocre mind known as ‘common sense’ has never produced anything worth celebrating.”

— Tom Robbins

167. “Violence stinks no matter which side of it you’re on. But now and then there’s nothing left to do but hit the other person over the head with a frying pan.”

— Tom Robbins

168. “I see you’ve met Desire and Fulfillment... Regret is in the kitchen making coffee.”

— Tom Robbins

169. “One tended to lose one’s bearings in the presence of willful and persistent acts of craziness, and the more gentle the act, the crazier it seemed, as if rage and violence, being closer to the norm, were easier to accommodate.”

— Tom Robbins

170. “Hope springs eternal and all that, yet isn’t it a fact that when we give up and quit hoping; genuinely, sincerely quit hoping, things usually change for the better? Zen masters say that when we become convinced that the human situation is hopeless, we approach serenity, the ideal state of mind.”

— Tom Robbins

171. “True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.”

— Tom Robbins

172. “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.”

— Tom Robbins

173. “Those people who recognise that imagination is reality’s master, we call sages, and those who act upon it, we call artists.”

— Tom Robbins

174. “If every time we choose a turd, society, at a great expense, simply allows us to redeem it for a pepperoni, then not only will we never learn to make smart choices, we will also surrender the freedom to choose, because a choice without consequences is no choice at all.”

— Tom Robbins

175. “Purpose! Purposes are for animals with a hell of a lot more dignity than the human race! Just hop on that strange torpedo and ride it to wherever it’s going.”

— Tom Robbins

176. “Get yourself in that extreme state of being next to madness. You should always write with an erection. Even if you’re a woman.”

— Tom Robbins

177. “Much scientific truth proved to be as hypothetical as poetic allegory. The relationshiip of those rod-connected blue and red balls to an actual atomic structure was about the same as the relationship of Christianity to the fish or the Lamb.”

— Tom Robbins

178. “It was laughter that might have been squeezed from the tubes of his own darkest heart, then amplified fifty times through the bellows of a loon’s ass.”

— Tom Robbins

179. “When it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book”.”

— Tom Robbins

180. “Morality depends on culture. Culture depends on climate.”

— Tom Robbins

181. “Freedom has long proven too heady an elixir for America’s masses, weakened and confused as they are by conflicting commitments to puritanical morality and salacious greed.”

— Tom Robbins

182. “Life isn’t simple; it’s overwhelmingly complex. The love of simplicity is an escapist drug, like alcohol.”

— Tom Robbins

183. “Ellen Cherry understood then that religion was an improper response to the Divine.”

— Tom Robbins

184. “To specialize is to brush one tooth. When a person specializes he channels all of his energies through one narrow conduit; he knows one thing extremely well and is ignorant of almost everything else.”

— Tom Robbins

185. “Don’t talk about it – you’ll talk it away. Let the ideas flow from your mind to the page without exposing them to air. Especially hot air.”

— Tom Robbins

186. “How can you admire a human who consciously embraces the bland, the mediocre, and the safe rather than risk the suffering that disappointment can bring?”

— Tom Robbins

187. “Listen, I’ve been sick ever since I started working here, but today I’m well and I won’t be in anymore.”

— Tom Robbins

188. “Although the surface of our planet is two-thirds water, we call it the Earth. We say we are earthlings, not waterlings. Our blood is closer to seawater than our bones to soil, but that’s no matter. The sea is the cradle we all rocked out of, but it’s to dust that we go. From the time that water invented us, we began to seek out dirt. The further we separate ourselves from the dirt, the further we separate ourselves from ourselves. Alienation is a disease of the unsoiled.”

— Tom Robbins

189. “Carelessness is a weakness that isn’t tolerated in this order,” he says in a voice that the average housewife would have to take out of the freezer at two in the afternoon if she wanted it thawed in time for supper.”

— Tom Robbins

190. “When you blow up a major life situation, as I did on two fronts before leaving Richmond, the explosion can leave a hole in your psyche. Nature abhors a vacuum, however, and over time the crater is almost certain to fill in with new wisdom – or fresh folly. Sometimes it can be a challenge to tell the difference.”

— Tom Robbins

191. “Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver. In fact, the person who maintains absolute standards of good and evil usually is the maniac with the revolver.”

— Tom Robbins

192. “If by the quarter of the twentieth century godliness wasn’t next to something more interesting than cleanliness, it might be time to reevaluate our notions of godliness.”

— Tom Robbins

193. “The only normal people are the ones you don’t know well yet.”

— Tom Robbins

194. “But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity’s a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation.”

— Tom Robbins

195. “As expected, you get his machine. Someday, even the “call of nature” will be answered by a machine.”

— Tom Robbins

196. “The Divine was expansive, but religion was reductive. Religion attempted to reduce the Divine to a knowable quantity with which mortals might efficiently deal, to pigeonhole it once and for all so that we never had to reevaluate it. With hammers of cant and spikes of dogma, we crucified and crucified again, trying to nail to our stationary altars the migratory light of the world.”

— Tom Robbins

197. “Early religions were like muddy ponds with lots of foliage. Concealed there, the fish of the soul could splash and feed. Eventually, however, religions became aquariums. Then hatcheries. From farm fingerling to frozen fish stick is a short swim.”

— Tom Robbins

198. “I love myself,” he said. “But it’s unrequited.”

— Tom Robbins

199. “If the earth needs night as well as day, wouldn’t it follow that the soul requires endarkenment to balance enlightenment?”

— Tom Robbins

200. “So you think that you’re a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What’s wrong with that? In the first place, if you’ve any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.”

— Tom Robbins