“You risked your life, but what else have you ever risked? Have you risked disapproval? Have you ever risked economic security? Have you ever risked a belief? I see nothing particularly courageous about risking one's life. So you lose it, you go to your hero's heaven and everything is milk and honey 'til the end of time. Right? You get your reward and suffer no earthly consequences. That's not courage. Real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one's clichés.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is - and still not caring.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“The only authority I respect is the one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“Look, America is no more a democracy than Russia is a Communist state. The governments of the U.S. and Russia are practically the same. There's only a difference of degree. We both have the same basic form of government: economic totalitarianism. In other words, the settlement to all questions, the solutions to all issues are determined not by what will make the people most healthy and happy in the bodies and their minds but by economics. Dollars or rubles. Economy uber alles. Let nothing interfere with economic growth, even though that growth is castrating truth, poisoning beauty, turning a continent into a shit-heap and riving an entire civilization insane. Don't spill the Coca-Cola, boys, and keep those monthly payments coming.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“The fact is, what I hated in the Church was what I hated in society. Namely, authoritarians. Power freaks. Rigid dogmatists. Those greedy, underloved, undersexed twits who want to run everything. While the rest of us are busy living - busy tasting and testing and hugging and kissing and goofing and growing - they are busy taking over.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“This did not annoy Amanda for it had long been her theory that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“Human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“And then the rains came. They came down from the hills and up from the sound. And it rained a sickness. And it rained a fear. And it rained an odor. And it rained a murder. And it rained dangers and pale eggs of the beast. Rain poured for days, unceasing. Flooding occurred. The wells filled with reptiles. The basements filled with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics roamed the dripping peninsulas. Moisture gleamed on the beak of the raven. Ancient Shaman's rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clamshell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old warpaths, spilled the huckleberries, ran into the ditches. Soaking. Spreading. Penetrating. And it rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“The protagonist, Amanda, discusses her sex relationship with her husband, John Paul --
As long as it's done with honesty and grace, John Paul doesn't mind if I go to bed with other men. Or with other girls, as is sometimes my fancy. What has marriage got to do with it? Marriage is not a synonym for monogamy any more than monogamy is a synonym for ideal love. To live lightly on the earth, lovers and families must be more flexible and relaxed. The ritual of sex releases its magic inside or outside the marital bond. I approach that ritual with as much humility as possible and perform it whenever it seems appropriate. As for John Paul and me, a strange spurt of semen is not going to wash our love away.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“The purpose of art is to provide what life does not.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“The most important thing in life is style. That is the style of one s existence the characteristic mode of one s actions is basically ultimately what matters. For if man defines himself by doing then style is doubly definitive because style describes the doing. The point is this happiness is a learned condition. And since it is learned and self generating it does not depend upon external circumstances for its perpetuation. This throws a very ironic light on content. And underscores the primacy of style. It is content or rather the consciousness of content that fills the void. But the mere presence of content is not enough. It is style that gives content the capacity to absorb us to move us it is style that makes us care.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“I travel in gardens and bedrooms, basements and attics, around corners, through doorways and windows, along sidewalks, over carpets, down drainpipes, in the sky, with friends, lovers, children and heros; perceived, remembered, imagined, distorted and clarified.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“Consider the silent repose of the sausage as compared to the aggressiveness of bacon. ”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“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), a margin whose width and length may be determined by unknown factors but whose navigation is determined by the measure of the adventurer's nerve and wits. It is exhilarating to live by one's nerves or toward the summit of one's wits.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“And it rained a fever. And it rained a silence. And it rained a sacrifice. And it rained a miracle. And it rained sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“To an artist a metaphor is as real as a dollar.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“There were no mail-order catalogues in 1492. Marco Polo's journal was the wish book of Renaissance Europe. Then, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and landed in Sears' basement. Despite all the Indians on the escalator, Columbus' visit came to be known as a "discovery.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“And it rained a screaming. And it rained a rawness. And it rained a plasma. And it rained a disorder.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“Is that man's fate: to spend his closest hours to truth longing for a lie?”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“The function of the artist,' the Navajo answered, 'is to provide what life does not.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“Although the surface of our planet is two-thirds water, we call it the Earth. We say we are earthlings, not waterlings. Our blood is closer to seawater than our bones to soil, but that's no matter. The sea is the cradle we all rocked out of, but it's to dust that we go. From the time that water invented us, we began to seek out dirt. The further we separate ourselves from the dirt, the further we separate ourselves from ourselves. Alienation is a disease of the unsoiled.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“What an electric heater perched upon the rim of the bathtub of the world that dead Jesus was.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“To wit: actions, like sounds, divide the flow of time into beats.[...]The quality of a man's life depends on the rhyhmic structure he is able to impose upon the input and output of energy.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“The clown is a creature of chaos. His appearance is an affront to our sense of dignity, his actions a mockery of our sense of order. The clown (freedom) is always being chased by the policeman (authority). Clowns are funny precisely because their shy hopes lead invariably to brief flings of (exhilarating?) disorder followed by crushing retaliation from the status quo. It delights us to watch a careless clown break taboos; it thrills us vicariously to watch him run wild and free; it reassures us to see him slapped down and order restored. After all, we can condone liberty only up to a point. Consider Jesus as a ragged, nonconforming clown--laughed at, persecuted and despised--playing out the dumb show at his crucifixion against the responsible pretensions of authority.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“Often the things that pop out of my typewriter regale me, especially when I am trying to say something else and in a different way only to have a kind of metamorphosis take place during the act of typing and――whammo!――a concept I hadn't counted on is strutting it's vaudeville on the page.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“Birth, copulation, and death. Fine. In truth, however, there were at least two other things in which Amanda strongly believed. Namely: magic and freedom.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“Morels are ugly in the skillet. The caps look like the scrotums of leprechauns, the stems like the tusks of fetal elephants.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
“Oh, Marx,' Amanda sighed. 'You're so melodramatic. So what if it's this way or that way? When I was in convent school I used to stare out the windows at the clouds. I used to chase butterflies in the Mother Superior's flower patch. Those clouds and those butterflies, they didn't know secular from religious--and they didn't care.' 'I'm neither a cloud nor a butterlfy,' I snapped. 'We're all the same as clouds and butterflies. We just pretend to be something different.”
― Tom Robbins, quote from Another Roadside Attraction
Tom Robbins
Born place: in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, The United States
Born date July 22, 1936
See more on GoodReads
“Pitch tugged at Orias’s coat. “Don’t. Don’t do it.” Mactalde set his goblet on a nearby table and rose. The fire lit his face from the bottom up. “You’ve come so far on your quest to save your people. I don’t think you can abandon them now.” And the gut-wrenching truth was ... he couldn’t.”
― K.M. Weiland, quote from Dreamlander
“Every thing that purports to be the truth is, according to Heidegger, inevitably an approximation and true things, things that really are, rather than as we may apprehend them, are in themselves ineffable, ungraspable.”
― quote from The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
“And I say a final last prayer, this one in gratitude that there are people in the world who will protect kids with a fire that makes them sprint after cars, fight systems, curse with rage. It's enough to make you believe. Maybe not in symbols; maybe not in gods. But certainly in people.”
― Emery Lord, quote from The Names They Gave Us
“Once upon a time there were two seven-year-old boys named Bruce and David. They both had mother s who loved them very much.
Each boy's day began differently.”
― Adele Faber, quote from How to Talk So Teens Will Listen and Listen So Teens Will Talk
“Matthias and I met up again in the lab after Christmas vacations and sat down to write our paper. One major question was where to send it. Nature, the British journal, and its American counterpart Science, enjoy the most prestige and visibility in the scientific community and in the general media, and either would have been an obvious choice. But they both impose strict length limits on manuscripts, and I wanted to explain all the details of what we had done—not only to convince the world that we had the real thing but also to promote our painstaking methods of extracting and analyzing ancient DNA. In addition, I had become disenchanted with both journals because of their tendency to publish flashy ancient DNA results that did not meet the scientific criteria our group considered necessary. They often seemed more interested in publishing papers that would give them coverage in the New York Times and other major media outlets than in making sure the results were sound and likely to hold up.”
― quote from Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes
Vitro
The Scottish Prisone...
Forever You
The Rent Collector
Sanctum
Palace of StoneBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
