Tom Robbins Quotes

The trouble with the fast lane is that all the movement is horizontal. And I like to go vertical sometimes.

It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice.

The road to enlightenment is long and difficult. But the views from the top are worth it.

The best way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.

You should never hesitate to trade your cow for a handful of magic beans.

We’re our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.

We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

It’s not until you’re an adult and realize that no one’s going to take care of you, but you, that you’re free to lean on someone else.

Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.

If you’re honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you’re forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal.

The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.

The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.

Humor, a good sense of it, is to Americans, what manhood is to Spaniards and we will go to great lengths to prove it. Experiments with laboratory rats have shown that, if one psychologist in the room laughs at something a rat does, all of the other psychologists in the room will laugh equally. Nobody wants to prove he’s a killjoy by not laughing at something funny.

The more truth you live with, the more strength you obtain to cope with adversity.

If you want to be reminded of the love of the Lord, just watch the sunrise.

It is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it.

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

Because of the routine nature of our daily lives, we often forget that we are surrounded by miracles.

I don’t mind being burdened with being glamorous and sexual. Beauty and femininity are ageless and can’t be contrived, and glamour, although the manufacturers won’t like this, cannot be manufactured. Not real glamour; it’s based on femininity.

There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.

I was 15, and my father and I were bonding through acid.

Predictable is only a word that we use when we haven’t considered all the possibilities.

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

There are many things that we would throw away, if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

We are the shortest distance between two points.

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 relieve the repression of the human spirit, they must sow doubt and disruption.

Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything.

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

Perhaps the greatest magic of fiction is its unique power to grant new perspectives and open minds.

Never sustain a permanent injury to a small feeling.

People are sacred, but not untouchable.

The fears that people own are so commonly gossamer, so fragile, and yet if they are understood, supportive truths are developed that ultimately reduce those fears.

Dreams are nature’s answering service – don’t forget to pick up your messages once in a while.

There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.

The touching of souls connects one to the other in a rhythmic dance of life when all other steps are so often out of tune.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who, in the midst of the world, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Do you know about the foolish and mistaken notion that a complete stranger can provide, effortlessly some difficult-to-find service that will suddenly make your life easier and more pleasurable? It’s as common as gonorrhea and just as unwelcome.

All over the world there are people farting in bathtubs and being splendid in all kinds of ways.

Instead of putting yourself in the mind frame of ‘one day this happened and then that happened’, think of it like ‘it will never happen again’.