Tom Robbins (1932-2025)

Thomas Eugene Robbins was an American novelist. His most notable works are "seriocomedies". Robbins had lived in La Conner, Washington, since 1970, where he wrote nine of his books. His 1976 novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was adapted into the 1993 film version by Gus Van Sant. His last work, published in 2014, was Tibetan Peach Pie, a self-declared "un-memoir".

Quotes

If the world got any smaller, we'd all have to go on a diet.
Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures and rides it, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.
Its never too late to have a happy childhood.
There are many things worth living for, there are a few things worth dying for, but there is nothing worth killing for.
Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.
Actually, there are countless ways to live upon this tremorous sphere in mirth and good health, and probably only one way - the industrial, urbanized, herding way - to live here stupidly, and man has hit upon that one way.
We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.
Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn't bother to wipe its boots.
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.
If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

Brain
Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.

Government, Magic
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 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.
When she was a small girl, Amanda hid a ticking clock in an old, rotten tree trunk. It drove woodpeckers crazy. Ignoring tasty bugs all around them, they just about beat their brains out trying to get at the clock. Years later, Amanda used the woodpecker experiment as a model for understanding capitalism, Communism, Christianity, and all other systems that traffic in future rewards rather than in present realities.

Politics, Religion
...to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on Heaven is to create hell. In their desperate longing to transcend the disorderliness, friction, and unpredictability that pesters life; in their desire for a fresh start in a tidy habitat, germ-free and secured by angels, religious multitudes are gambling the only life they may ever have on a dark horse in a race that has no finish line."
Rap music... sounds like somebody feeding a rhyming dictionary to a popcorn popper.
Maybe most people were fundamentally contradictory. The real people at any rate.
If the world gets any smaller I'll end up living next door to myself.
There exists a false aristocracy based on family name, property, and inherited wealth. But there likewise exists a true aristocracy based on intelligence, talent and virtue.
Meditation... disolves the mind. It erases itself. Throws the ego out on its big brittle ass.
Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet.