Tom Robbins

Tom Robbins

Novelist, Essayist

Tom Robbins is an American author known for his playful and unconventional novels, such as 'Jitterbug Perfume', which explore themes of freedom and creativity.

People Thinking Writing Men Book Art
Born
July 22, 1932
Quotes
519
Rank
#566

Quote collection

Tom Robbins quotes (page 3 of 26)

519 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Tom Robbins Novelist, Essayist
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"A Hamburger is warm and fragrant and juicy. A hamburger is soft and nonthreatening. It personifies the Great Mother herself who has nourished us from the beginning. A hamburger is an icon of layered circles, the circle being at once the most spiritual and the most sensual of shapes. A hamburger is companionable and faintly erotic. The nipple of the Goddess, the bountiful belly-ball of Eve. You are what you think you eat."

Mother Spiritual Thinking
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"It's entirely possible to function as a free-thinking individual without succumbing to narcissism. This can be tricky at times, I suppose, but then so can the tango - particularly if you're dancing alone."

Thinking Dancing Narcissism
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"The Divine was beyond description, beyond knowing, beyond comprehension. To say that the Divine was Creation divided by Destruction was as close as one could come to definition. But the puny of soul, the dull of wit, weren't content with that. They wanted to hang a face on the Divine. They went so far as to attribute petty human emotions - anger, jealousy, etc - to it, not stopping to realize that if God were a being, even a supreme being, our prayers would have bored him to death long ago."

Prayer Knowing Long Ago
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"There is no such thing as a weird human being, It's just that some people require more understanding than others."

People Understanding Being Weird
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"Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need."

Memories Wish Contentment
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"Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef."

Cutting Magic Beef
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"In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings--artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers--to create order. In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery. To relive the repression of the human spirit, they must sow doubt and disruption."

Men Artist Order
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"Often, moreover, it is...that aspect of our being that society finds eccentric, ridiculous, or disagreeable, that holds our sweet waters, our secret well of happiness, the key to our equanimity in malevolent climes."

Sweet Keys Water
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"But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity's a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation."

Running Soul Mediocrity
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"Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the Sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realised its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness."

Spiritual Destiny Years
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"Outlaws, like lovers, poets, and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon."

Moon Keys Blood
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"Something has got to hold it together. I'm saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue."

Life God Prayer
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"When I sit down to write, I just let the goose out of the bottle."

Writing Bottles Geese
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"Curiosity, especially intellectual inquisitiveness, is what separates the truly alive from those who are merely going through the motions."

Inspiration Intellectual Curiosity
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"If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill-take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edges of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic."

Art Peace Passion
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"In fiction, when you paint yourself into a corner, you can write a pair of suction cups onto the bottoms of your shoes and walk up the wall and out the skylight and see the sun breaking through the clouds. In nonfiction, you don't have that luxury."

Wall Writing Clouds
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"If one yearns to see the face of the Divine, one must break out of the aquarium, escape the fish farm, to go swim up wild cataracts, dive in deep fjords. One must explore the labyrinth of the reef, the shadows of the lily pads. How limiting, how insulting to think of God as a benevolent warden, an absentee hatchery manager who imprisons us in the 'comfort' of artificial pools, where intermediaries sprinkle our restrictive waters with sanitized flakes of processed nutriment."

God Thinking Fjords
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