"John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?'"
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Quote collection
Tom Robbins quotes (page 21 of 26)
519 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Most novelists write about twisted lives."
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"This is the room where Jezebel frescoed her eyelids with history's tragic glitter"
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"Sometimes one gets the feeling that life still thinks it's living in Paris in the '30s."
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"There is a sense in which a painted stick is a stick in bloom. This stick points to the hidden face of God. Sometimes it points to you."
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"In referring to her earlier statement that he had was not her type because he was "a dollar short when it came to maturity and a day late when it came to peace." I may have been wrong about that," she conceded. "You are a complicated man, but happily complicated. You have found a way to be at home with the world's confusion, a way to embrace the chaos rather than struggle to reduce it or become its victim. It's all part of the game to you, and you are delighted to play. In that regard, you may have reached a more elevated plateau of harmony than...ummph."
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"Though February lay about her shoulders like a cloak of lead."
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"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."
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"The party in Alobar’s head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: existence can be rearranged."
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"All dreams continue in the beyond."
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"You know what I mean? Real and unreal, beautiful and strange, like a dream. It got me high as a kite, but it didn’t last long enough. It ended too soon and left nothing behind.” That’s how it is with dreams,” said Priscilla. “They’re the perfect crime."
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"There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in domination, and we are all secretly attracted to violence."
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"Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere - the sudden revelation that there is a there out there."
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"When we accept small wonders, we qualify ourselves to imagine great wonders."
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"Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means."
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"Leave it to a naive world-saver like you to view our love as a Sacred Cause when in actual fact all it was was some barking at the moon."
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"Religions lead us to believe that the soul is the ultimate family jewel and that in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in their vaults, or at least insure it against fire and theft. They are mistaken."
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"Much scientific truth proved to be as hypothetical as poetic allegory. The relationshiip of those rod-connected blue and red balls to an actual atomic structure was about the same as the relationship of Christianity to the fish or the Lamb."
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"We approach the divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains."
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"There are stories still in existence that I wrote when I was five. However, I did not get published until I was seven."
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