"This did not annoy Amanda for it had long been her theory that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another."
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Quote collection
Tom Robbins quotes (page 20 of 26)
519 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You have taught us much. Come with us and join the movement." "This movement of yours, does it have slogans?" inquired the Chink. "Right on!" they cried. And they quoted him some. "Your movement, does it have a flag?" asked the Chink. "You bet!" and they described their emblem. "And does your movement have leaders?" "Great leaders." "Then shove it up your butts," said the Chink. "I have taught you nothing."
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"I think science has begun to demonstrate that aging is a disease. If it is, it can be cured."
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"The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves."
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"Consider the silent repose of the sausage as compared to the aggressiveness of bacon."
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"Get yourself in that intense state of being next to madness. Keep yourself in, not necessarily a frenzied state, but in a state of great intensity. The kind of state you would be in before going to bed with your partner. That heightened state when you're in a carnal embrace: time stops and nothing else matters. You should always write with an erection. Even if you're a woman."
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"Plato did claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure."
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"His voice wore no pants."
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"Political activism is seductive because it seems to offer the possibility that one can improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self."
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"Maybe most people were fundamentally contradictory. The real people at any rate."
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"If you were Jesus with missing years to kill where would you go?"
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"But the center can be a harmful place for one who has lived so long on the edge.... Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization."
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"White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermingling of cultures unheard of in any other American city, South or North; although there has prevailed a most joyous and fascinating interface, black anger and white fear has persisted, providing the ongoing, ostensibly integrated fete champetre with volatile and sometimes violent idiosyncrasies."
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"Love makes the world go 'round, it's true, but lust stops the world in its tracks; love renders bearable the passage of time, lust causes time to stand still, lust kills time, which is not to say that it wastes it or whiles it aimlessly away but rather that it annihilates it, cancels it, extirpates it from continuum; preventing, while lasts, any lapse into the tense and shabby woes of temporal society, lust is the thousand-pound odometer needle on the dashboard of the absolute."
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"Dreams don't come true. Dreams are true."
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"I sweet potato what I sweet potato."
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"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."
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"A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences."
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"I would only read the novels that people classify as 'beach books' if I were being held prisoner and the only alternative was the 'Book of Mormon.'"
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"If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering."
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