Tom Robbins Quotes

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.

Individualism is a formidable lie.

People think of travel, of movement, as a kind of reprieve from life. But they're wrong. Movement isn't a reprieve. There is no reprieve. Movement is our permanent state.

It is amazing the quality of human beings that are in this world if we can just get past people not dressing the way we want them to dress.

We are tempted to live under the illusion that somewhere out there are people who are normal.

I can't walk five steps without someone on a walkie talkie going, 'She's wandering over there.' I'm pretty stuck, but hey, it's been great.

I really think I want to live in a lot of places.I don't want possessions to hold me down.

The cliché organizes life; it expropriates people's identity; it becomes ruler, defense lawyer, judge, and the law.

Since I ought to be arrogant, impressed with my social position, overwhelmed by my beauty, therefore I am. Actually I was never my own type so I completely missed my beauty all through my youth. I have no social position and I stay away from what is known as society as much as possible. But people like to re-invent you, according to cliché.

Sometimes I feel kind of wrong here. I used to be normal, but now... I don't know. I feel like I should be one way, but I'm not." Toby stared at her. "I hear that." He sighed. "There are all these perfect people here. And... it's like, if you're not one of the,. then you're messed up. But I think, inside, the flawless-looking people are just as messed up as we are.

I feel like it's a subversive thing [a certain body type to admire] which keeps women preoccupied with something that doesn't matter, and takes up a lot of space, and prevents people from what they're meant to be doing.

Free countries are great, because you can actually sit in somebody else's space for a while and pretend you're a part of it. You can sit in the Plaza Hotel and you don't even have to live there. You can just sit and watch the people go by.

I've seen so many people in my life struggle tremendously to fit into those boxes or to live up to those expectations or pressures put upon them by whatever society's concept of 'normal' is. I get frustrated by rules and regulations. I'm frustrated by things that are exclusive to one particular life choice.

O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!

The important thing is that over time, scientific progress transforms things that used to have to be dealt with in a problem-solving mode down to the pattern-recognition space; and from pattern recognition into the rules-based mode. This is the mechanism by which less-trained people are enabled to do more sophisticated things. This is always the way disruption happens. It enables a larger population of less-experienced people to do more sophisticated things.

A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one's neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid.

I really like to be by myself and if I do go out to look around, I dress in jeans. My secretary is constantly telling me to dress up, shave and look your best because people know you. That bothers me. I just want to be natural.

We are special in the sense that we can know our place in the cosmos. We can know our place in space. We are at least one of the cosmos's ways of knowing itself. That fills me with reverence and joy. Another insight I really want people to consider is this: everyone has gotten this far. Everyone you meet has made it this far. Nobody is superior to anyone else from an evolutionary standpoint.

I still live my life the way that I want to live it, and people are very respectful of my space, but they also want to chat, and I quite like chatting.

Norway has a relationship with the EU which is very close. It has to accept most EU rules. It has to pay EU membership fees. It has free movement of people just like other EU countries, but it's not actually in the EU.

The different tempos and yeah, it's cadence. It's the way she moves through space, it's gestures.

Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives.

I know that one is able to win people far more by the spoken that by the written word, and that every great movement on this globe owes its rise to the great speakers and not to the great writers.

I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people.

I have discovered that many of the things I thought were priceless are as cheap as costume jewelry, and much of what I labeled worthless was, all the time, filled with the kind of beauty that directly nourishes my soul... Now I think that the vast majority of us "normal" people spend our lives trashing our treasures and treasuring our trash. We bustle around trying to create the impression that we are hip, imperturbable, omniscient, in perfect control, when in fact we are awkward and scared and bewildered.