Tom Robbins
It is as if the soul of the continent is weeping. Why does it weep? It weeps for the bones of the buffalo. It weeps for magic that has been forgotten. It weeps for the decline of poets.It weepsfor the black people who think like white people.It weepsfor the Indians who think like settlers.It weepsfor the children who think like adults.It weepsfor the free who think like prisoners.Most of all, it weepsfor the cowgirls who think like cowboys.Collection: Children
Toys are made in heaven, batteries are made in hell.Collection: Heaven
Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it.Collection: Life Changing
Of the seven deadly sins, lust is definitely the pick of the litter.Collection: Lust
I think too much is known about me already. I think biographical information can get in the way of the reading experience. The interchange between the reader and the work. For example, I know far too much about Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. Because I know as much as I do about their personal lives, I can't read their work without this interjecting itself. So if I had it to do over, I'd probably go the way of J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. And just stay out of it altogether and let all the focus be on the work itself and not on me.Collection: Reading
I've always assumed that every time a child is born, the Divine reenters the world. Okay? That's the meaning of the Christmas story. And every time that child's purity is corrupted by society, that's the meaning of the Crucifixion story. Your man Jesus stands for that child, that pure spirit, and as its surrogate, he's being born and put to death again and again, over and over, every time we inhale and exhale, not just at the vernal equinox and on the twenty-fifth of December.Collection: Jesus
If we're ever going to get the world back on a natural footing, back in tune with natural rhythyms, if we're going to nurture the Earth and protect it and have fun with it and learn from it - which is what mothers do with their children - then we've got to put technology (an aggressive masculine system) in its proper place, which is that of a tool to be used sparingly, joyfully, gently and only in the fullest cooperation with nature. Nature must govern technology, not the other way around.Collection: Mother
Rivers are the primal highways of life. From the crack of time, they had borne men's dreams, and in their lovely rush to elsewhere, fed our wanderlust, mimicked our arteries, and charmed our imaginations in a way the static pond or vast and savage ocean never could.Collection: Dream
Love is very powerful, but it has limits and it's a costly mistake to spread it too thin.Collection: Powerful
Maybe what I admired most about John Steinbeck is that he never mortgaged his 45-acre heart for a suite in an ivory tower.Collection: Heart
From the outside, my life may look chaotic, but inside I feel like some kind of monk licking an ice cream cone while straddling a runaway horse.Collection: Horse
Success can eliminate as many options as failure.Collection: Success
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.Collection: Civilization
We all dream profusely every night, yet by morning we've forgotten ninety percent of what went on. That's why poets are such important members of society. Poets remember our dreams for us.Collection: Dream
You wonder if God doesn't have an answering machine to screen out the prayers of the venal and the boring? And in which category has he placed you?Collection: God
But say you've inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it's soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure.Collection: Beach
Well, there's one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich.Collection: Funny
Christianity... is an Eastern religion.Collection: Christianity
The scientist keeps the romantic honest, and the romantic keeps the scientist human.Collection: Science
If you were Jesus with missing years to kill where would you go?Collection: Jesus
I sweet potato what I sweet potato.Collection: Sweet
Maybe most people were fundamentally contradictory. The real people at any rate.Collection: Real
Laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it's love and love alone that really matters.Collection: Love
As expected, you get his machine. Someday, even the "call of nature" will be answered by a machine.Collection: Humorous
The most useful thing about art is it's uselessness.Collection: Art
Survival is not important. What matters is how you survive.Collection: What Matters
The author isn't altogether certain that there is any such thing as exaggeration. Our brains permit us to use such a wee fraction of their resources that, in a sense, everything we experience is a reduction. We employ drugs, yoga techniques and poetics - and a thousand more clumsy methods - in an effort just to bring things back up to normal.Collection: Yoga
A spirit cannot soar with only one wing.Collection: Wings
A thing is good because it is good, not because it is natural. A thing is bad because it is bad, not because its artificial. It is not a damn iota better to be bitten by a rattlesnake than shot by a gun.Collection: Gun
The principal difference between an adventurer and a suicide is that the adventurer leaves himself a margin of escape (the narrower the margin the greater the adventure)Collection: Suicide
What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make other peoples' decisions for them?Collection: Decision
The Japanese have become so smitten with the Western condiment - its texture as silky as a kimono, its tang as understated as the tang of Zen - that today they have a word for mayonnaise junkie: mayora.Collection: Funny
She needed help, but God was in a meeting whenever she rang.Collection: God
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.Collection: Animal
Switters was actually quite fond of Seattle's weather, and not merely because of it's ambivalence. He liked it's subtle, muted qualities and the landscape that those qualities encouraged if not engendered: vistas that seemed to have been sketched with a sumi brush dipped in quicksilver and green tea. It was fresh, it was clean, it was gently primal, and mystically suggestive.Collection: Weather
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.Collection: Moon
Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means.Collection: Mean
When we accept small wonders, we qualify ourselves to imagine great wonders.Collection: Wonder
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.Collection: Blessing
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.Collection: Comfort
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.Collection: Beautiful
All dreams continue in the beyond.Collection: Dream
The party in Alobar’s head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: existence can be rearranged.Collection: Party
Nobody quite knew what to make of the moon any more.Collection: Philosophy
Love is dope, not chicken soup.Collection: Dope
I mean that gods do not limit men. Men limit men.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Faces
If by the quarter of the twentieth century godliness wasn’t next to something more interesting than cleanliness, it might be time to reevaluate our notions of godliness.Collection: Interesting
Just because you're naked doesn't mean you're sexy. Just because you're cynical doesn't mean you're cool.Collection: Sexy