Tom Robbins

"The shaman lives outside the social system, refusing to have any part of it. Yet he seems to connect the populace to the heavens and the earth far more directly than the priest."

"She needed help, but God was in a meeting whenever she rang."

"Twenty candles on a cake. Twenty Camels in a pack. Twenty months in the federal pen. Twenty shots of tequila down a young girl's gullet. Twenty centuries since Our Lord's last pratfall, and after all that time we still don't know where passion goes when it goes."

"If you didn't serve the nasty fellow (God), the Romans would burn your house down. If you did serve him, you were called a Christian and got to burn other people's houses down."

"You don't have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House."

"Let me see if I can put it in words that even the inebriated might understand."

"Bernard Mickey Wrangle had developed a psychological test of his own. It was short, simple, and infallible. To administer the test, merely ask the subject to name his or her favorite Beatle. If you are at all familiar with the distinct separate public images of the four Beatles, then you'll recognize that the one chosen reveals as much about the subject's personality as most of us will ever hope to know."

"Who knows how to make love stay? Tell love you are going to the Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half. It will stay. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning."

"Above the building, the sky recalled passages from Les Miserables, threadbare and gray."

"Modern Romans insisted that there was only one god, a notion that struck Alobar as comically simplistic."

"In the quiet ache of the evening, Alobar listened to his calluses grow."

"I journey to the east, where I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners."

"Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air — moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh — felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing."

"If you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropiate port you find yourself docked."

"I'll never write another novel on an electric typewriter. I'd rather use a sharp stick and a little pile of dogshit."

"It's never too late to have a happy childhood."

"Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano. It's not the tobacco we're after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning."

"This is the way to burn," the fuse seemed to be saying to the more docile, slow-witted candlewick. "Brilliantly, ecstatically, irrepressibly. This is the way to burn."

"They glared at her the way any intelligent persons ought to glare when what they need is a smoke, a bite, a cup of coffee, a piece of ass, or a good fast-paced story, and all they're getting is philosophy."

"It is so amusing the way that mortals misunderstand the shape, or shapes, of time. … In the realms of the ultimate, each person must figure out things for themselves. … Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received."

"Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard."

"When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on — series polygamy — until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimension to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter."

"On the campus of Outlaw College, professors of essential insanities would characterize the conflicting attitudes of Nina Jablonski and Leigh-Cheri as indicative of a general conflict between social idealism and romanticism. As any of the learned professors would explain, plied with sufficient tequila, no matter how fervently a romantic might support a movement, he or she eventually must withdraw from active participation in that movement because the group ethic — the supremacy of the organization over the individual — is an affront to intimacy. Intimacy is the principal source of the sugars with which this life is sweetened. It is absolutely vital to the essential insanities."

"If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done."

"Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem."

"I sense that novel of my dreams is in the Remington SL3 — although it writes much faster than I can spell."

"This baby (the Remington SL3 typewriter) speaks electric Shakespeare at the slightest provocation and will rap out a page and a half if you just look at it hard."

"There is a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like a part of the act."

"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."

"Her surname resembled a line from an optometrist's examination chart."

"Hawaii made the mouth of her soul water."

"They'd be no threat to me. I have a black belt in Haiku. And a black vest in the cleaners."

"There are essential and inessential insanities. The latter are solar in character, the former are linked to the moon."

"Sharks are the criminals of the sea. Dolphins are the outlaws."

"She lunched on papaya poo poo or mango mu mu or some other fruity foo foo bursting with overripe tropical vowels."

"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."

"He looked at her with that kind of painted-on seriousness that comedians shift into when they get their chance to play Hamlet."

"The man and woman firmly shook hands. The solution to the overpopulation problem might rest in such handshakes."

"A better world has gotta start somewhere. Why not with you and me?"

"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. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws."

"They snuggled closer, and when they were as close as they could get without being behind one another, they commenced to kiss again."

"This stuff's so fine Julius Caesar called for it with his dying breath. 'A toot, Brutus,' is what he said."

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

""I'll follow him to the ends of the earth," she sobbed. Yes, darling. But the earth doesn't have any ends. Columbus fixed that."

"A rabbi's dog could score pork chops in the streets of Tel Aviv easier than Bernard could acquire tequila in King County Jail."

"She tried out the chamber pot, although she really had nothing to contribute."

"Any half-awake materialist well knows — that which you hold holds you."

"The first time that she spread her legs for him it had been like opening her jaws for the dentist."

"Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense."

"... overdramatizing the word of God, turning the Scriptures into a cross between a German opera and a hockey game."