Top 500 Tom Robbins Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “In the end, perhaps we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that’s continually retold in an accent too thick and strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke my friends. The soul is the punch line.”

— Tom Robbins

252. “I do not know why the dead do not come back to life. Perhaps death is so wonderful, in ways we cannot comprehend, that they prefer it over and above their friends and loved ones, although I am inclined to doubt that be the case.”

— Tom Robbins

253. “Love is private and primitive and a bit on the funky and frightening side. I think of the Luna card in the Tarot deck: some strange, huge crustacean, its armor glistening and its pinchers wiggling, clatters out of a pool while wild dogs howl at a bulging moon. Underneath the hearts and flowers, love is loony like that. Attempts to housebreak it, to refine it, to dress the crabs up like doves and make them sing soprano always result in thin blood. You end up with a parody.”

— Tom Robbins

254. “Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver.”

— Tom Robbins

255. “South Richmond was a neighborhood of mouse holes, lace curtains, Sears catalogs, measles epidemics, baloney sandwiches- and men who knew more about the carburetor than they knew about the clitoris.”

— Tom Robbins

256. “I’m an outlaw not a philosopher, but I know this much: there’s meaning in everything, all things are connected, and a good champagne is a drink.”

— Tom Robbins

257. “Nothing is implied here. Except the possibility that everything is connected.”

— Tom Robbins

258. “The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent, not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.”

— Tom Robbins

259. “They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning.”

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

261. “The winter passed as slowly and peacefully as a boa constrictor digesting a valium addict.”

— Tom Robbins

262. “The pain of love does not break hearts, it merely seasons them. The disappointed heart revives itself and grows meaty and piquant. Sorrow expands it and makes it pithy. The spirit, on the other hand, can snap like a bone and may never fully knit.”

— Tom Robbins

263. “In Seattle, I soon found that my radical ideas and aesthetic explorations – ideas and explorations that in Richmond, Virginia, might have gotten me stoned to death with hush puppies – were not only accepted but occasionally applauded.”

— Tom Robbins

264. “It’s been said that golf is a Zen activity. I’d argue that if golfers were practicing Zen, they wouldn’t keep score.”

— Tom Robbins

265. “IT WAS AUTUMN, the springtime of death. Rain spattered the rotting leaves, and a wild wind wailed. Death was singing in the shower. Death was happy to be alive.”

— Tom Robbins

266. “Intimacy is the principal source of the sugars which this life is sweetened!”

— Tom Robbins

267. “If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it.”

— Tom Robbins

268. “It was autumn, the springtime of death.”

— Tom Robbins

269. “In Bokonon, it is written that “peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”

— Tom Robbins

270. “Tequila, scorpion honey, harsh dew of the doglands, essence of Aztec, crema de cacti; tequila, oily and thermal like the sun in solution; tequila, liquid geometry of passion; Tequila, the buzzard god who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying virgins; tequila, firebug in the house of good taste; O tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate!”

— Tom Robbins

271. “Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words “make” and “stay” become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.”

— Tom Robbins

272. “Though February lay about her shoulders like a cloak of lead.”

— Tom Robbins

273. “People aren’t trees, so it is false when they speak of roots.”

— Tom Robbins

274. “Kudra was amused by Alobar’s tentative polka until her eyes fell upon the tumescent protrusion dancing with him. Disgusting she thought. An erection is just inappropriate. Then she realized with a shock that she was so wet that children could have sailed toy boats in her underpants.”

— Tom Robbins

275. “Madame Lily Devalier always asked “Where are you?” in a way that insinuated that there were only two places on earth one could be: New Orleans and somewhere ridiculous.”

— Tom Robbins

276. “To some extent, Seattle remains a frontier metropolis, a place where people can experiment with their lives, and change and grow and make things happen.”

— Tom Robbins

277. “Life’s an offensive proposition from beginning to end. Maybe those who can’t tolerate offense ought to just go ahead and end it all, and maybe those who demand financial compensation for offense ought to have it ended for them.”

— Tom Robbins

278. “Does koala bear poop smell like cough drops?”

— Tom Robbins

279. “What an electric heater perched upon the rim of the bathtub of the world that dead Jesus was.”

— Tom Robbins

280. “Zippers are primal and modern at the very same time. On the one hand, your zipper is primitive and reptilian, on the other, mechanical and slick. A zipper is where the Industrial Revolution meets the Cobra Cult.”

— Tom Robbins

281. “Political activism is seductive because it seems to offer the possibility that one can improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one’s perceptions and transforming one’s self.”

— Tom Robbins

282. “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

283. “Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.”

— Tom Robbins

284. “Whatever goes wrong can be used to your advantage, providing it goes wrong enough.”

— Tom Robbins

285. “Well, there’s one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich.”

— Tom Robbins

286. “You wonder if God doesn’t have an answering machine to screen out the prayers of the venal and the boring? And in which category has he placed you?”

— Tom Robbins

287. “When I go to the shore, I take along the poems of Pablo Neruda. I suppose it’s because the poems are simultaneously lush and ripe and kind of lazy, yet throbbing with life – like summer itself.”

— Tom Robbins

288. “We use so much bad language that it forms a barrier between ourselves and the truth.”

— Tom Robbins

289. “If little else, the brain is an educational toy.”

— Tom Robbins

290. “On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.”

— Tom Robbins

291. “Don’t trust anybody who’d rather be grammatically correct than have a good time.”

— Tom Robbins

292. “Most Americans pay lip service to the idea of freedom, but can’t handle real freedom.”

— Tom Robbins

293. “Naked, she lay sprawled on her side like a shipwrecked cello.”

— Tom Robbins

294. “It’s a privilege to love someone, to truly love them; and while it’s paradisaical if she or he loves you back, it’s unfair to demand or expect reciprocity. We should consider ourselves luck, honored, blessed that we possess the capacity to feel tenderness of such magnitude and be grateful even when that love is not returned. Love is the only game in which we win even when we lose.”

— Tom Robbins

295. “You know what the game of golf is, don’t you? It’s basketball for people who can’t jump and chess for people who can’t think.”

— Tom Robbins

296. “You knows dat in New Orleans is not morning ’til dee sun come up.”

— Tom Robbins

297. “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

298. “Definitions are limiting. Limitations are deadening. To limit oneself is a kind of suicide. To limit another is a kind of murder.”

— Tom Robbins

299. “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.”

— Tom Robbins

300. “A few flat clouds folded themselves like crepes over fillings of apricot sky. Pompadours of supper-time smoke billowed from chimneys, separating into girlish pigtails as the breeze combed them out, above the slate rooftops. Chestnut blossoms, weary from having been admired all day, wore faint smiles of anticipation.”

— Tom Robbins