Top 500 Tom Robbins Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “One of the other musicians said that the tambourine is a female due to the fact that it makes a pretty jingle and is designed to be spanked. That is the more recent, patriarchal attitude, I suppose.”

— Tom Robbins

402. “You are an ignorant schoolgirl. You think civilization is a good thing.”

— Tom Robbins

403. “Everywhere a buffalo fell,” said Switters, “a monster sprang up in its place.”

— Tom Robbins

404. “Outside, the rains had come, the rains that like a blizzard of guppies would pelt the creaky old house until spring. There is no weeping that can compete with the northwest rains.”

— Tom Robbins

405. “I have never ever Googled myself, in fact I think the Christian right prohibits such things.”

— Tom Robbins

406. “Granny and me alone on Judgment Day and wonder if there is some wider meaning there, some cryptic message from a hidden dimension, from the Other, from the Over Self. Or if it was simply that heaven didn’t want us and hell was afraid we’d take over.”

— Tom Robbins

407. “Above all, have a good time. If you aren’t enjoying writing it, you can hardly expect someone else to enjoy reading it.”

— Tom Robbins

408. “Life still begins in the womb, cocky erections still collapse and lie useless when woman’s superior sexuality is finished with them, but men control the divine channels now, and while that control may be largely an illusion, their laws, institutions, and elaborate weaponry exist primarily to maintain it.”

— Tom Robbins

409. “The Japanese have become so smitten with the Western condiment – its texture as silky as a kimono, its tang as understated as the tang of Zen – that today they have a word for mayonnaise junkie: mayora.”

— Tom Robbins

410. “The king poured maple syrup on his waffle. The syrup puddled the depressions in the waffle the way that desire puddles the folds in the brain.”

— Tom Robbins

411. “Being able to create your own work, being able to indulge your own fantasies is so much better than journalism, so much more fulfilling than journalism, to me, that as long as I can continue to write fiction, I shall.”

— Tom Robbins

412. “His first – and worst – mistake was blindly doing what he was told to do. Without questioning their methods or their motives, he allowed politicians to make the decisions that led to his early demise.”

— Tom Robbins

413. “If you lack the iron and the fizz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense.”

— Tom Robbins

414. “Sometimes, though, I feel that pushing books is a whole lot like pushing medicine. Think of books as pills. I have pills that cure ignorance and pills that cure boredom. I have pills to elevate moods and pills to open people’s eyes to the awful truth: uppers and downers as they were. I sell pills to help people find themselves and pills to help them lose themselves when they require escape from the pressures and anxieties of life in a complex society...”

— Tom Robbins

415. “Must look into the botanical background of substance known as hashish,” I jotted in my journal, writing by the light of candles that grew incessantly jewel-like even as protean wafts of incense approached my snout like platters of ripe fruits borne on the back of Nubian pages.”

— Tom Robbins

416. “In a voice that sounds the way a can of cheap dog food would sound if a can of cheap dog food could speak, he tells you you are looking well.”

— Tom Robbins

417. “As we drive up the river road, there are sixty thousand trees which I see but do not touch. Like me, Amanda is confined in the speeding Jeep, but she touches every tree.”

— Tom Robbins

418. “When we can converse with the animals, we will know the change is halfway here. When we can converse with the forest, we will know the change has come.”

— Tom Robbins

419. “A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don’t know how to write sentences.”

— Tom Robbins

420. “A spirit cannot soar with only one wing.”

— Tom Robbins

421. “Personally, I’ve found maturity an overrated quality except in wine, for both creative artists and lively people in general have much to gain from facing the world with the unsullied vision, flexible responses, and playful sensibilities of a child.”

— Tom Robbins

422. “People tend to take everything too seriously. Especially themselves.”

— Tom Robbins

423. “Evidently, I’d suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.”

— Tom Robbins

424. “Perhaps that is why desire causes men calamity. By identifying with our desires and taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of those desires.”

— Tom Robbins

425. “I like to think of myself as a fiction writer who liked art enough to write about it for a while, and then went on to his fiction.”

— Tom Robbins

426. “Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it may be levity.”

— Tom Robbins

427. “As you are surely aware, our planet is turning on its axis around and around in space. It turns slowly, however, making one complete rotation only every twenty-four hours; and that’s a good thing – isn’t it? – because if our world turned as fast as Gracie’s room appeared to be turning, the sun would be either rising or setting every fifteen minutes, astronomers would be as woozy as rodeo clowns, and it’d be nearly impossible to keep our meatballs from rolling out of our spaghetti.”

— Tom Robbins

428. “If I have been given any gift in this life, it’s my ability to live simultaneously in the rational world and the world of imagination.”

— Tom Robbins

429. “Ultimately, the roast turkey must be regarded as a monument to Boomer’s love.”

— Tom Robbins

430. “Salvador Dali and fifty cents will get you a cup of clock melt.”

— Tom Robbins

431. “So, the scholars are tedious, the experts never see the whole truth of things, still they have their role to play.”

— Tom Robbins

432. “A sausage is an image of rest, peace and tranquility in stark contrast to the destruction and chaos of everyday life.”

— Tom Robbins

433. “I’ve long tended to regard the interruption of complacency as a kind of public service.”

— Tom Robbins

434. “She puckered her bubble gum mouth until its exaggerated sensuality drew attention away from the blood-blue crescents beneath her eyes. “My bags may be packed, but I haven’t left town. No wonder Ricki finds me irresistible. She’s only human.” Leaning.”

— Tom Robbins

435. “A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time.”

— Tom Robbins

436. “You have to eat your technique. Digest it. It’s in your blood, but you’re not concerned with it anymore.”

— Tom Robbins

437. “She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obscured the already vague circumstances of its origins.”

— Tom Robbins

438. “If you want your tree to produce plenty o’ fruit, you’ve got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin’.”

— Tom Robbins

439. “Not surprisingly, the socks remain silent, as was their legal right.”

— Tom Robbins

440. “The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves.”

— Tom Robbins

441. “Outlaws are not members of society. However, they may be important to society.”

— Tom Robbins

442. “The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans’ insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion.”

— Tom Robbins

443. “When I was younger, before this layoff which has nearly finished me, I hitchhiked one hundred and twenty-seven hours without stopping, without food or sleep, crossed the continent twice in six days, cooled my thumbs in both oceans and caught rides after midnight on unlighted highways, such was my skill, persuasion, rhythm. I set records and immediately cracked them; went farther, faster than any hitchhiker before or since.”

— Tom Robbins

444. “Breath Properly, Stay Curious, and Always Eat Your Beets!”

— Tom Robbins

445. “Elsewhere, they might call the wind Mariah, but here its name was Something Fishy.”

— Tom Robbins

446. “She lunched on papaya poo poo or mango mu mu or some other fruity foo foo bursting with overripe tropical vowels.”

— Tom Robbins

447. “What difference does it make if the Gospel is mostly a lie? It’s an engrossing story and the words of its hero are excellent words to live by, even today.”

— Tom Robbins

448. “When had it begun, my fantasy of the golden letter? It was probably in my late teens or early twenties that I first became inexplicably possessed of the notion that one day the mailman would deliver a letter to my door that would dramatically alter my life. For the better, I should add: this conviction was in no way a premonition of misfortune or sorrow. In fact, in my daydream the letter was surrounded by a kind of golden aura.”

— Tom Robbins

449. “Perhaps sound carries farther across time than across space.”

— Tom Robbins

450. “I began to hitchhike in something akin to geological time: slow, ancient, vast.”

— Tom Robbins