Tom Robbins Quotes

The American Race is marked by a brown complexion; long, black, lank hair; and deficient beard.

Yeah, I think that's sort of the American way. And it's also the Polish way, it turns out.

My dad's side of the family had lots of artists and musicians. There's an emotional, quite sentimental quality to Slavic culture. It's very open, it loves art, it loves music, it loves literature. It's very warm, it's very up, it's very down. I would celebrate that.

Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy.

Once you start listening to the comics, be they Jewish, Muslim, Italian, Filipino or whatever, the material often springs from the same source - the overbearing mom, the parents who want you to marry from within your community. That's why the 'Ethnic Show' works so well.

Being Irish, I grew up eating a Sunday roast.

I've been seesawing between not doing too much racial stuff - because I'd rather be known as the funny comedian than the funny Chinese comedian - but at the same time embracing my voice and who I am and what makes me unique, you know, which is the racial background.

I always felt different and it was because I was Middle Eastern. Where most people were very fair, light-skinned, and had blue eyes, I was hairy with dark hair and dark skin.

The Ethiop gods have Ethiop lips, Bronze cheeks, and woolly hair; The Grecian gods are like the Greeks, As keen-eyed, cold and fair.

I'm Teoish," Sarene said, successfully spearing something that looked like a marinated piece of shrimp. "We're all this tall." "Father's Teoish too, Kaise," Daorn said. "And you know how tall he is." "But father's fat," Kaise pointed out. "Why aren't you fat too, Sarene?

The Jew has always been a people with definite racial characteristics and never a religion.

I'm very proud of being Jewish. It means I have a good work ethic, and you get Jewish humour and you're allowed to tell Jewish jokes.

In the middle of the next century, when the literary establishment will reflect the multicultural makeup of this country and not be dominated by assimiliationists with similar tastes, from similar backgrounds, and of similar pretensions, Langston Hughes will be to the twentieth century what Walt Whitman was to the nineteenth.

It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home.

The Negro is the child of two cultures - Africa and America. The problem is that in the search for wholeness all too many Negroes seek to embrace only one side of their natures.

We belong to the race that knows Joseph

The acknowledgement that this person is English, white, or French, or German, this is Portuguese, this is Rwandan, this is Senegalese, this is a black South Africans is a glorious thing. To speak of those positively, to say that they have characteristics, each one of them, that the others almost always do not have, and that there is a complementarily about it.

Racial and denominational schools impart to the membership of their communities something which the general educational institution is wholly unable to inculcate.

We're not Americans, we're Africans who happen to be in America. We were kidnapped and brought here against our will from Africa. We didn't land on Plymouth Rock - that rock landed on us.

human beings seem to hold on more tenaciously to a cultural identity that is learned through suffering than to one that has been acquired through pleasure and delight.

For black people in the western hemisphere, if you can't generate a mythology that creates models of heroism and power out of the mythology that you had, then that means that somehow the mythology you had was not only feeble and weak, but that you are ultimately a powerless people. That's a notion that, I think, that can't be accepted.

Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.

Being Nigerian is a strong part of my identity. Being American is a strong part of my identity. And there are important parts of who I am that really have nothing to do with my national connection.

I always felt the Jewish part more. In fact, growing up I felt like a Jew among WASPs. My brother is more decidedly Waspy.

Polka will never die.