Top 500 Tom Robbins Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable.”

— Tom Robbins

203. “People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.”

— Tom Robbins

204. “Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means.”

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

206. “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

207. “Jackson Pollock said once, “I don’t really feel that many people in this world are alive.” He said, “That’s why I like you, Tom. You’re alive.””

— Tom Robbins

208. “There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself. Answer me that and I will ease your mind about the beginning and the end of time. Answer me that and I will reveal to you the purpose of the moon.”

— Tom Robbins

209. “An old Ukrainian proverb warns, “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil.” That is a risk we have to take.”

— Tom Robbins

210. “There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself.”

— Tom Robbins

211. “One has not only an ability to perceive the world but an ability to alter one’s perception of it; more simply, one can change things by the manner in which one looks at them.”

— Tom Robbins

212. “Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is sign on as its accomplice.”

— Tom Robbins

213. “The full moon – the mandala of the sky.”

— Tom Robbins

214. “Any half-awake materialist well knows – that which you hold holds you.”

— Tom Robbins

215. “The French say that the best part of an affair is going up the stairs.”

— Tom Robbins

216. “The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism.”

— Tom Robbins

217. “Nobody quite knew what to make of the moon any more.”

— Tom Robbins

218. “Some praise me, some blame me. I go the other way. Sometimes those things that attract the most attention to us are the things which afford us the greatest privacy.”

— Tom Robbins

219. “The sky was the color of Edgar Allan Poe’s pajamas.”

— Tom Robbins

220. “If love eats the donut, does time eat the hole?”

— Tom Robbins

221. “In the end what will prevail is your passion not your tale, for love is the Holy Grail.”

— Tom Robbins

222. “Sharks are the criminals of the sea. Dolphins are the outlaws.”

— Tom Robbins

223. “As any car freak will tell you, the old models are the most beautiful, even if they aren’t the most efficient. People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve.”

— Tom Robbins

224. “If you want to make a name for yourself, the oldest trick in the book is to attack what everybody else reveres.”

— Tom Robbins

225. “There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in domination, and we are all secretly attracted to violence.”

— Tom Robbins

226. “Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need.”

— Tom Robbins

227. “Survival is not important. What matters is how you survive.”

— Tom Robbins

228. “Conservatives understand Halloween, liberals only understand Christmas. If you want to control a population, don’t give it social services, give it a scary adversary.”

— Tom Robbins

229. “The minute you land in New Orleans, something wet and dark leaps on you and starts humping you like a swamp dog in heat, and the only way to get that aspect of New Orleans off you is to eat it off.”

— Tom Robbins

230. “To emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on heaven is to create hell.”

— Tom Robbins

231. “In fiction, when you paint yourself into a corner, you can write a pair of suction cups onto the bottoms of your shoes and walk up the wall and out the skylight and see the sun breaking through the clouds. In nonfiction, you don’t have that luxury.”

— Tom Robbins

232. “Should a person possess a heart that is as light as a feather, then that person is granted immortality.”

— Tom Robbins

233. “Cant you understand that romanticism is no more an enemy of science than mysticism is? In fact, romanticism and science are good for each other. The scientist keeps the romantic honest and the romantic keeps the scientist human.”

— Tom Robbins

234. “This did not annoy Amanda for it had long been her theory that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.”

— Tom Robbins

235. “The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy.”

— Tom Robbins

236. “Like women in general, like Aries women in particular, like redheaded Aries women in greater particular, she loathed to be misunderstood. Injustice against others outraged her, injustice against herself set her to boiling like brimstone soup.”

— Tom Robbins

237. “Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It’s no coincidence we call them ’deadlines.”

— Tom Robbins

238. “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.”

— Tom Robbins

239. “Plato did claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure.”

— Tom Robbins

240. “They’ve built their nests in the chimneys of my heart: those swallows that you lost.”

— Tom Robbins

241. “Brilliantly, ecstatically, irrepressibly. This is the way to burn.”

— Tom Robbins

242. “But do we know how to make love stay?? I can’t even think about it. The best I can do is play it day by day.”

— Tom Robbins

243. “The moon can’t help it. It’s only a fat dumb object, the pumpkin of the sky. The moon’s a mess, to tell the truth. A burnt-out cinder the color of dishwater; a stale gray cookie covered with scars. Every loose rock in our solar system has taken a punch at it. It’s been scorched, golf-clubbed, and inflicted with boils. If lovers have chosen this brutalized derelict, this tortured dustball, this pitted and pimpled parcel of wasteland as the repository of their dreams, the moon can’t help it.”

— Tom Robbins

244. “The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being. Still, lovers quarrel. Frequently, they quarrel simply to recharge the air between them, to sharpen the aliveness of their relationship.”

— Tom Robbins

245. “This is the room where Jezebel frescoed her eyelids with history’s tragic glitter.”

— Tom Robbins

246. “He was becoming unstuck, he was sure of that – his bones were no longer wrapped in flesh but in clouds of dust, in hummingbirds, dragonflies, and luminous moths – but so perfect was his equilibrium that he felt no fear. He was vast, he was many, he was dynamic, he was eternal.”

— Tom Robbins

247. “Those who willingly accept being conned are as corrupt as those who con them.”

— Tom Robbins

248. “Things. Cosas. Things attach themselves like leeches to the human soul, then they bleed out the sweetness and the music and the primordial joy of being unencumbered upon the land.”

— Tom Robbins

249. “Our world isn’t made of earth, air and water or even molecules and atoms; our world is made of language.”

— Tom Robbins

250. “Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn’t bother to wipe its boots.”

— Tom Robbins