Tom Robbins Quotes

It is of the essence of traditions that they cover or conceal their humble foundations by erecting impressive edifices on them.

I prefer tailored clothes. I always have. But I find that whatever I wear, people see it as charged with symbolic meaning.

In the Kamigata area, they have a sort of tiered lunchbox they use for a single day when flower viewing. Upon returning, they throw them away, trampling them underfoot. The end is important in all things.

The eyes were hollow and the carven head was broken, but about the high, stern forehead there was a coronal of silver and gold. A trailing plant with flowers like white stars had bound itself across the brows as if in reverence for the fallen king, and in the crevices of his stony hair yellow stonecrop gleamed. "They cannot conquer for ever!" said Frodo.

The member of a primitive clan might express his identity in the formula "I am we"; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an "individual," existing apart from his group.

The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

Sex is the root of which intuition is the foliage and beauty is the flower.

Study the behavior of animals and you will understand human psychology and sociology. Study a flower excited under sunlight, and you will understand how all living things respond to light. The Almighty has provided everything in nature. Observe nature and you will grow. The cures of all illnesses are found in nature in the shapes of the body parts they were created to cure.

Grandfather was well known for being stubborn in his ideas. For instance... you had to go to sleep facing east so that you would be ready to greet the sun when it returned.

Under the Mountain dark and tall The King has come unto his hall! His foe is dead, the Worm of Dread, And ever so his foes shall fall. The sword is sharp, the spear is long, The arrow swift, the Gate is strong; The heart is bold that looks on gold; The dwarves no more shall suffer wrong. The dwarves of yore made mighty spells, While hammers fells like ringing bells In places deep, where dark things sleep, In hollow halls beneath the fells. -from The Hobbit (Dwarves Battle Song)

Oh, London is a man's town, there's power in the air; And Paris is a woman's town, with flowers in her hair; And it's sweet to dream in Venice, and it's great to study Rome; But when it comes to living, there is no place like home.

I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.

A flower's fragrance declares to all the world that it is fertile, available, and desirable, its sex organs oozing with nectar. Its smell reminds us in vestigial ways of fertility, vigor, life-force, all the optimism, expectancy, and passionate bloom of youth. We inhale its ardent aroma and, no matter what our ages, we feel young and nubile in a world aflame with desire.

Alas! the culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe.

The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.

Do you know why the Indian rain dances always worked? Because the Indians would keep dancing until it rained.

X. I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!” XI. I saw their starved lips in the gloam, With horrid warning gaped wide, And I awoke and found me here, On the cold hill’s side. XII. And this is why I sojourn here, Alone and palely loitering, Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing.

As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols.

We must buy jewelry; it identifies us with our tribe, just as body piercing identifies those of a different tribe.

His brow is seamed with line and scar; His cheek is red and dark as wine; The fires as of a Northern star Beneath his cap of sable shine. His right hand, bared of leathern glove, Hangs open like an iron gin, You stoop to see his pulses move, To hear the blood sweep out and in. He looks some king, so solitary In earnest thought he seems to stand, As if across a lonely sea He gazed impatient of the land. Out of the noisy centuries The foolish and the fearful fade; Yet burn unquenched these warrior eyes, Time hath not dimmed, nor death dismayed.

Archetypes are universal, and, in subtle or extravagant ways, interchangeable.

My own belief is that in most ages and in most places obscure psychological forces led men to adopt systems involving quite unnecessary cruelty, and that this is still the case among the most civilized races at the present day.

Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings — stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once again.

In the Christianity of Christendom the Cross has become something like the child’s hobby-horse and trumpet.