Top 500 Tom Robbins Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

256. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

259. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

261. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

265. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

285. “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

286. “Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air – moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh – felt as if it were being exhaled into one’s face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing.”

— Tom Robbins

287. “In a patriarchal society, the abiding sexuality of the healthy female was obliged to wear a prim disguise.”

— Tom Robbins

288. “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

289. “Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.”

— Tom Robbins

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

294. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

296. “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

297. “There is a sense in which a painted stick is a stick in bloom. This stick points to the hidden face of God. Sometimes it points to you.”

— Tom Robbins

298. “A hamburger is an icon of layered circles, the circle being at once the most spiritual and the most sensual of shapes.”

— Tom Robbins

299. “The human race has always defined itself through narration. That isn’t going to change just because we’ve gone electronic. What is changing is that now we’re allowing corporations to tell our stories for us.”

— Tom Robbins

300. “Our religion, our party, our tribe, our town, our school, our race, our nation. Believe. Belong. Behave. Or Be damned.”

— Tom Robbins