"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful even if it is only a floating ash."

"Help," he said "is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly."

"The brain gives up a lot less easily than the body."

"Painted on one side of our Sunday school wall were the words, God is Love. We always assumed that these three words were spoken directly to the four of us in our family and had no reference to the world outside, which my brother and I soon discovered was full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the farther one gets from Missoula, Montana."

"My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things — trout as well as eternal salvation — come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy."

"As a Scot and a Presbyterian, my father believed that man by nature was a mess and had fallen from an original state of grace. Somehow, I early developed the notion that he had done this by falling from a tree. As for my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician but he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God's rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word "beautiful.""

"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman."

"Scholars are still in search of the exact meaning of certain speeches in each of Shakespeare’s great tragedies — and we should like to assume that those who saw these plays for the first time did not have perfect understanding of all of the lines — but so great was Shakespeare’s power to conceive of action from which thought and feeling can be readily inferred that all of us know Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth more intimately than we know many men whose remarks we understand perfectly."

"At a high level of universality, to write anything well, whether it be intellectual or imaginative, is to assume at least two obligations: to be intelligible and to be interesting. Intelligibility, too, has its levels of obligation, on the lowest of individual statements, and even on this level the obligation is never easy to fulfill and perhaps even to genius could be a nightmare if what the genius sought to represent was “madness.” Only to a limited degree, however, can individual statements be intelligible — and in many instances and for a variety of reasons the individual statements are meant to be obscure, as in “mad” speeches. Since full intelligibility depends upon the relations of individual statement to individual statement, the concept of intelligibility, fully expanded, includes order and completeness; for a fully intelligible exposition or poem having relations has parts, and all the parts ought to be there and add up to a whole. The second major obligation, that of being “interesting,” includes unexpectedness and suspense, for expository as well as imaginative writing should not be merely what the reader expected it would be — or why should it be written or read? — and the unexpected should not be immediately and totally announced (in other words, expository and imaginative writing should have suspense), for, if the whole is immediately known, why should the writer or reader proceed farther? But the accomplished writer gives his selected material more than shape — he gives it proper size. For a piece of writing to have its proper size is an excellent thing, or otherwise it would be lacking in intelligibility or interest or both."

"I’d say I was doing a great job submitting to God by submitting to my desires. Who do you think gave me desire in the first place?"

"“Nyxnissa?” She looked back at the queen. “There are no happy endings, Nyxnissa.” “I know,” Nyx said. “Life keeps going.”"

"You could stand near him, listen to him speak, and feel as if you were in the presence of some wiser man, a true mullah. His uncles were the same. Rich, powerful men whose influence allowed them to profit from the war, not fight in it."

"Don’t confuse rescue and kidnapping. I have not asked to be rescued."

"It wasn’t what was done to you. Life was what you did with what was done to you."

"“We have a war to fight. You don’t understand. We fight in God’s name.” “I understand just fine,” Nyx said."

"The world could burn around her, the cities turn to dust, the cries of a hundred thousand fill the air, and she would get up after the fire died and walk barefoot and burned over the charred soil in search of clean water, a weapon, a purpose. She would rebuild."

"She had already been to hell. One prayer more or less wouldn’t make any difference."

"A well-appointed prison is still a prison."

"Not everything that’s beautiful is weak."

"“How can you read such a beautiful book and turn your back on it?” “Never said it wasn’t a beautiful book. I just don’t believe there’s some man up there in the black who gets off on watching us pound our head on the pavement six times a day."

"Countries at war lived in a state of perpetual fear."

"May you be ever overwhelmed by how many people you love."

"God is the sum of all histories."

"One man's disobedience is another's derring-do."

"What a gift we are to us!"

"How can you pray if you can't even dance?"

"Beauty has no superlative."

"It would behoove us to groove."

"All the world's a cage, and all the men and women are merely hamsters"

"Anyway, the trick is simply this: No matter what happens, keep your heart open. Wide open. The heart is made of love, and love is indestructible, and only the arrogance of ego would presume that it requires protection. To open your heart is to reduce your ego, and this is the only magic that is ever required to experience the naked truth."

"If you're not inspired, you are expired."

"The only good leader is a reluctant one."

"Do your own thing, be your own king, that’s my philosophy. Lead or get out of the way."

"Don't get involved, get evolved."

"Forty-odd years ago, there was a countercultural moment, a brief, shining moment, as it were, when the eyes of a generation glimpsed the Eden beneath the veil. However fleeting was this paradise, or however harsh has been its repression, its light nonetheless inspired a rowdy cohort of artists to carry its torch into the future. Tom Robbins is one of these unruly pioneers, and his frequently bestselling novels are so saturated in an uncontainable joie de vivre that they have remained virtually required reading throughout the years and decades since their initial publication."

"No event, no matter how preposterous, will fail to find itself indispensable to some future happenstance."

"One of the most difficult things in the world is to learn to take a hint easily."

"A man needs a friend not to flatter him, but to strengthen him at his weak points."

"No man knows where his business ends and his neighbor's begins."

"No man has all the wisdom in the world; everyone has some."

"As a rule, you'll not have much trouble having your way, if you are right."

"When a man is trying to sell you something, don't imagine he is that polite all the time."

"To want your own way is a very bad habit, for you will never get it."

"There is usually enough of everything on the table except cream."

"So many of the optimists in the world don't own a hundred dollars, and because of their optimism, never will."

"People hate the man who is a constant drain on their sympathy."

"Having fun is a dismal business after you pass fifty."

"A woman does not spend all her time in buying things; she spends part of it in taking them back."

"The man who can keep a secret may be wise, but he is not half as wise as the man with no secrets to keep."

"Men are virtuous because the women are; women are virtuous from necessity."