"It's good to bear in mind that like it or not, enlightenment has always been, even in a golden age, pretty much limited to an elite."
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Quote collection
Tom Robbins quotes (page 11 of 26)
519 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses."
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"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."
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"There's birth, there's death, and in between there's maintenance."
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"what bothers me today is the lack of, well, i guess you'd call it authentic experience. so much is a sham. so much is artificial, synthetic, watered-down, and standardized...we're standardizing people, their goals, their ideas. the sham is everywhere."
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"Once one pays some attention to something, then you begin to see evidence of it everywhere."
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"When a man confines an animal in a cage, he assumes ownership of that animal. But an animal is an individual; it cannot be owned. When a man tries to own an individual, whether that individual be another man, an animal or even a tree, he suffers the psychic consequences of an unnatural act."
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"There is a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like a part of the act."
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"Who knows how to make love stay? Tell love you are going to the Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half."
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"Solace? That's why God made fermented beverages and the blues."
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"People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve. (Bernard Mickey Wrangle, p 99)"
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"The sky was the color of Edgar Allan Poe's pajamas."
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"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."
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"What we have here is an unexpected touchdown on the runway of the heart."
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"Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit."
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"The first time that she spread her legs for him it had been like opening her jaws for the dentist."
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"Whenever I finish a book, I go off and have some kind of adventure. Having had an adventure in my writing chair or on my writing sofa, an internal adventure, then I need to balance that off with an external adventure, so I'll go tramping through Africa or whitewater rafting or float to Hawaii in a martini shaker or something."
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"The very act of creation requires such focused concentration that vast areas of knowledge may be completely overlooked. Well, so what? There is no evidence that generalized skills are in any way superior to specialized brilliance."
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"Fire is the reuniting of matter with oxygen. If one bears that in mind, every blaze may be seen as a reunion, an occasion of chemical joy."
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"As a child, I was an imaginary playmate."
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