Top 500 Tom Robbins Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “A thing is good because it is good, not because it is natural. A thing is bad because it is bad, not because its artificial. It is not a damn iota better to be bitten by a rattlesnake than shot by a gun.”

— Tom Robbins

352. “In the life of the individual, an aesthetic sensibility is both more authentic and more commendable than a political or religious one.”

— Tom Robbins

353. “He was as nervous as a praying mantis at an atheists’ picnic...”

— Tom Robbins

354. “You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.”

— Tom Robbins

355. “I work with pen and paper. That’s my favorite way to write. I love the way the ink sinks into the wood, soaks into the wood pulp. There’s something about that process that’s so organic.”

— Tom Robbins

356. “It’s hard to say who’s a greater threat to the world, an ambitious CEO with a big ad budget or a crafty cleric with an obsolete Bible verse.”

— Tom Robbins

357. “Only the obtuse are unappreciative of paradox.”

— Tom Robbins

358. “What was it like in there? Inside a daisy?” My answer: “Like a cathedral made of mathematics and honey.”

— Tom Robbins

359. “Your petal from the salty rose.”

— Tom Robbins

360. “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

361. “It is more important to be free than to be happy.”

— Tom Robbins

362. “Maybe most people were fundamentally contradictory. The real people at any rate.”

— Tom Robbins

363. “Was it wife soup and husband soup on the Other Side? Or was it simply soup?”

— Tom Robbins

364. “Since the Goddess always has been honored in sacred groves, it is understandable that patriarchs, then as now, leaned toward deforestation.”

— Tom Robbins

365. “Sometimes one gets the feeling that life still thinks it’s living in Paris in the ’30s.”

— Tom Robbins

366. “We are seldom as limited as we think we are.”

— Tom Robbins

367. “Okay, it is what it is and I am what I it, but its isness and my itness seem to be stretching the meaning of “is” and “it.”

— Tom Robbins

368. “Enlightened and endarkened. The ultimate.”

— Tom Robbins

369. “We approach the divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains.”

— Tom Robbins

370. “In the world according to the positivist, the inspiring thing about scrambled eggs is that any way you turn them they’re sunny side up. In the world according to the existentialist, the hopeless thing about scrambled eggs is that any way you turn them they’re scrambled.”

— Tom Robbins

371. “Toys are made in heaven, batteries are made in hell.”

— Tom Robbins

372. “I don’t want to give the impression that I hold daily conversations with my household appliances, although my toaster is as old as Drew Barrymore and almost as talented.”

— Tom Robbins

373. “And it rained a screaming. And it rained a rawness. And it rained a plasma. And it rained a disorder.”

— Tom Robbins

374. “Sissy Hankshaw once taught a parakeet to hitchhike.”

— Tom Robbins

375. “Don’t you see? The enemy represents Death to ‘em. The government propaganda mills paint the enemy as an unfeelin’, devourin’ monster. So, when we go to war we go on a noble mission, a life-affirming mission, whose object is the destruction o’ death. And ‘tis precisely because we hate death so much that we’re too crazed and irrational to see the irony in it. We hate death so bloody much that we will kill – and die – in order to try to halt its march.”

— Tom Robbins

376. “To eliminate the agitation and disappointment of desire, we need but awaken to the fact that we have everything we want and need right now.”

— Tom Robbins

377. “I started writing when I was 5 years old. I would dictate stories to my mother, and she would copy them in a scrapbook. If she changed anything to make it, in her opinion, better, I would throw a tantrum.”

— Tom Robbins

378. “To concentrate on heaven is to create hell.”

— Tom Robbins

379. “Every individual has to assume responsibility for his or her own actions, even the poor and the young. A social system that decrees otherwise is inviting intellectual atrophy and spiritual stagnation.”

— Tom Robbins

380. “Now I’d fallen into it like a drunk hobo falling into a vat of champagne.”

— Tom Robbins

381. “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

382. “My grandmother,” he said, “confessed to me once that before she’d ever let herself become deeply involved with a man, she’d make sure to get him drunk. Maestra claims you can never know who a person really is unless you’ve seen how they behave when under the spell of Bacchus. It’s a hard and fast rule with no exceptions: a bad drunk will make a bad husband. Or wife, for that matter. Sobriety for some people, is a thin and temporary disguise.”

— Tom Robbins

383. “Jerusalem was where it all went down, man. It was connected to heaven like Spanish Harlem was connected to Puerto Rico.”

— Tom Robbins

384. “Hemingway and Norman Mailer might have disagreed, but there is no heavyweight champion of literature.”

— Tom Robbins

385. “First I think I was interested in the stories, and later on, I became more interested in the language itself, so the stories became almost secondary, but it was kind of a background music for my life.”

— Tom Robbins

386. “I went to a large consolidated school in Appalachia. And I wrote the story when I was in the second grade and I took it up to the third floor to the school newspaper office that was written and edited by juniors and seniors.”

— Tom Robbins

387. “Wasn’t it made clear that civilization is not an end in itself but a theater or gymnasium in which the evolving individual finds facilities for practice?”

— Tom Robbins

388. “This darling Marvelous has eaten at many tables and has not been nourished.”

— Tom Robbins

389. “Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on them arrow of the volcano. It’s not the tobacco we’re after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.”

— Tom Robbins

390. “There was a purity about him, a blaze in his eyes, that bordered on the charismatic. I also had the sense that hanging out with him would be dangerous: not because he might prove mean, violent, dishonest, or crazier than anybody else I knew, but because he seemed both completely uncompromised and completely uncompromising. As Henry Miller said of Rimbaud, he was “like a man who discovered electricity but knew absolutely nothing about insulation.”

— Tom Robbins

391. “What we have here is an unexpected touchdown on the runway of the heart.”

— Tom Robbins

392. “Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good.”

— Tom Robbins

393. “He worked too hard, smiled too little and dined as one indifferent to both flavor and fate; he clearly was a hero in need of rescue by a princess.”

— Tom Robbins

394. “She had only the slimmest notion of what he meant, but his voice made her so horny she could barely keep from squirming, crossing her legs, or hopping about, like a little girl who had to go to the bathroom. On.”

— Tom Robbins

395. “Indeed, the first step toward becoming a true outlaw is the refusal to be victimized.”

— Tom Robbins

396. “Oh, Marx,′ Amanda sighed. ‘You’re so melodramatic. So what if it’s this way or that way? When I was in convent school I used to stare out the windows at the clouds. I used to chase butterflies in the Mother Superior’s flower patch. Those clouds and those butterflies, they didn’t know secular from religious – and they didn’t care.’ ‘I’m neither a cloud nor a butterlfy,’ I snapped. ‘We’re all the same as clouds and butterflies. We just pretend to be something different.”

— Tom Robbins

397. “Maybe what I admired most about John Steinbeck is that he never mortgaged his 45-acre heart for a suite in an ivory tower.”

— Tom Robbins

398. “I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.”

— Tom Robbins

399. “The clown is a creature of chaos.”

— Tom Robbins

400. “Summer had come to sit on New York’s face.”

— Tom Robbins