Top 500 Tom Robbins Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

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. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

412. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

418. “Alcoholism is an imperfect spiritual longing.”

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

421. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “Time brought along its secretary, memory, and space brought its brat, loneliness.”

— Tom Robbins

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

— 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. “The lesson was the same: This program is subject to change – often unexpectedly, sometimes in the batting of an eye. It’s the best argument I know against suicide.”

— Tom Robbins

434. “The trip left the girl gaga, goofy, tainted, transformed, her nose a busted hymen through which sperm of a thousand colors swam a hootchy-kootchy stroke into her cerebral lagoon.”

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

437. “There are those who have condemned Leary as a liar, a sellout, an opportunist, and most of all, a raging egomaniac; but the truth is, he was simply Irish.”

— Tom Robbins

438. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

440. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

445. “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

446. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

448. “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

449. “The accumulation of material things is shallow and vain, but to have a genuine relationship with such things is to have a relationship with life and, by extension, a relationship with the divine.”

— Tom Robbins

450. “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