"Some folks hide and some folks seek, and seeking when its mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous, can be a form of hiding."
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Quote collection
Tom Robbins quotes (page 10 of 26)
519 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Above all, have a good time. If you aren’t enjoying writing it, you can hardly expect someone else to enjoy reading it."
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"A sense of humor...is superior to any religion so far devised."
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"In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable."
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"There are essential and inessential insanities... Inessential insanities get one in trouble with oneself. Essential insanities get one in trouble with others. It's always preferable to be in trouble with others. In fact, it may be essential."
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"A mockingbird... was heard to blend the songs of 32 different kinds of birds into a 10 minute performance, a virtuoso display that served no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art."
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"The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature."
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"Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works."
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"Certainly that sputterless little candleflame of the mediocre mind known as 'common sense' has never produced anything worth celebrating."
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"To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese."
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"When life demands more of people than they demand of life - as is ordinarily the case - what results is a resentment of life almost as deep-seated as the fear of death"
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"If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it."
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"The theme of corporate stories (and millions drink them in every day) seldom varies: to be happy you must consume, to be special you must conform. Absurd, obviously, yet our identities have become so fragile, so elusive, that we seem content to let advertisers provide us with their version of who we are, to let them recreate us in their image: a cookie-cutter image based on market research, shallow sociology, and insidious lies."
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"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."
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"Time passed. Art came off the walls and became rituals. Ritual became religion. Religion spawned science. Science led to big business. And big business, if it continues on its present, mindless trajectory, could land those lucky enough to survive its ultimate legacy back into caves again."
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"We say we are earthlings, not waterlings. Our blood is closer to seawater than our bones to soil, but thats no matter. The sea is the cradle we all rocked out of, but its to dust that we go. From the time that water invented us, we began to seek out dirt. The further we separate ourselves from the dirt, the further we separate ourselves from ourselves. Alienation is a disease of the unsoiled."
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"Poetry, the best of it, is lunar and is concerned with the essential insanities. Journalism is solar (there are numerous newspapers named The Sun, none called The Moon) and is devoted to the inessential."
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"From the air, Vatican City looked like a marble Monopoly set. The Church owned all the property from Broadwalk to Illinois Avenue, has three hotels on every lot, and no matter how often it tossed the dice you just knew it would never land on Go to Jail, it would be forever passing Go and collecting $200."
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"Hawaii made the mouth of her soul water."
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"A spirit cannot soar with only one wing."
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