Tom Robbins Quotes

What is certain is that singing is not merely modulating a song by means of the voice: we sing and we celebrate the beauty that we can grow and live every day. If you want to sing and give emotions to those who are listening, you must have something to tell through your singing; you have to use singing like an instrument to tell something.

I can understand why people would want to stay on the road because you create your own bubble. You almost don't live in the real world. Just to have the things that are with you is fine.

When we close ourselves off, we're not just closing ourselves off to other people, we're closing ourselves off from ourselves and impeding ourselves. When you open up, you allow yourself to be who you are.

I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

All along — not only since she left, but for a decade before — I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who — because no one thought she was a person — had no one to really talk to.

It's the time of the night I like best, when most people are asleep and it feels like the world belongs completely to my friends and me, as though nothing exists apart from out little circle: everywhere else is darkness and quiet.

there was something about that city, though it didn't let me feel guilty that I had no feeling for the things so many others needed. it let me alone. sitting up in my bed the lights out, hearing the outside sounds, lifting my cheap bottle of wine, letting the warmth of the grape enter me as I heard the rats moving about the room, I preferred them to humans. being lost, being crazy maybe is not so bad if you can be that way undisturbed. New Orleans gave me that. nobody ever called my name.

The Stars. Jared slept beneath them, uneasy in the rustling leaves. From the battlements Finn gazed up at them, seeing the impossible distances between galaxies and nebulae, and thinking they were not as wide as the distances between people. In the study Claudia sensed them, in the sparks and crackles on the screen. In the prison, Attia dreamt of them, She sat curled on the hard chair, Rix repacking his hidden pockets obsessively with coins and glass discs and hidden handkerchiefs. A single spark flickered deep in the coin Keiro spun and caught, spun and caught.

Of course I loved books more than people.

If you fear nothing, you love nothing. If you love nothing, what joy can there be in life?

The great irony to Dirk [Gently] is that he sees connections in everything, but the one thing he fails and struggles with most is connecting with other people.

I know I have within myself... a side of solitude. I think people who know me can see, but people who just meet me can't because I'm generally very fun and gregarious. I love to spend a lot of time on my own. I can seriously go into my own head and often love to let myself travel where I don't know where I'm going. I always felt that that was his kind of form of escape, in a way.

Outlawed, but not alone, for Love Is outlawed, too. You cannot banish us, proud world: We banish you.

Friends are necessary to a happy life. When friendship deserts us, we are as helpless as a ship left by the tide high upon the shore. When friendship returns to us, it's as though the tide came back, giving us buoyancy and freedom.

I didn't like being alone. Being alone was slightly better than having to deal with people, that's all. Or so I'd convinced myself.

I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.

I am not jealous of what came before me. Come with a man on your shoulders, come with a hundred men in your hair, come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet, come like a river full of drowned men which flows down to the wild sea, to the eternal surf, to Time! Bring them all to where I am waiting for you; we shall always be alone, we shall always be you and I alone on earth, to start our life!

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.

I... keep trying to find a way to become what I'd like to be and what I could be if... if only there were no other people in the world.

In order not to feel time's horrid fardel bruise your shoulders, grinding you into the earth, get drunk and stay that way. On what? On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever. But get drunk!

I'm so happy to be around people. I just really like people, and being a freelancer can be lonely during the day, when you're at home trying to write anything you can.

I just try to do what I'm interested in and hope that some people will connect.

People have forgotten what the human touch is, what it is to smile, for somebody to smile at them, somebody to recognize them, somebody to wish them well. The terrible thing is to be unwanted.

If you sing of beauty though alone in the heart of the desert you will have an audience.

We aren't the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on.