Maryn > Maryn's Quotes

“We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.”
― Tom Robbins

“When two people meet and fall in love, there's a sudden rush of magic. Magic is just naturally present then. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more. One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone. We hustle to get it back, but by then it's usually too late, we've used it up. What we have to do is work like hell at making additional magic right from the start. It's hard work, but if we can remember to do it, we greatly improve our chances of making love stay.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it in, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“Curiosity, especially intellectual inquisitiveness, is what separates the truly alive from those who are merely going through the motions.”
― Tom Robbins

“You've heard of people calling in sick. You may have called in sick a few times yourself. But have you ever thought about calling in well?

It'd go like this: You'd get the boss on the line and say, "Listen, I've been sick ever since I started working here, but today I'm well and I won't be in anymore." Call in well.”
― Tom Robbins

“My faith is whatever makes me feel good about being alive. If your religion doesn't make you feel good to be alive, what the hell is the point of it?”
― Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

“Oh God, are there so many of them in our land! Students who can’t be happy until they’ve graduated, servicemen who can’t be happy until they are discharged, single folks who can’t be happy until they’ve found a mate, workers who can’t be happy until they’ve retired, adolescents who aren’t happy until they’re grown, ill people who aren’t happy until they’re well, failures who aren’t happy until they succeed, restless who can’t wait until they get out of town, and in most cases, vice versa, people waiting, waiting for the world to begin.”
― Tom Robbins

“To diminish the worth of women, men had to diminish the worth of the moon. They had to drive a wedge between human beings and the trees and the beasts and the waters, because trees and beasts and waters are as loyal to the moon as to the sun. They had to drive a wedge between thought and feeling...At first they used Apollo as the wedge, and the abstract logic of Apollo made a mighty wedge, indeed, but Apollo the artist maintained a love for women, not the open, unrestrained lust that Pan has, but a controlled longing that undermined the patriarchal ambition. When Christ came along, Christ, who slept with no female...Christ, who played no musical instrument, recited no poetry, and never kicked up his heels by moonlight, this Christ was the perfect wedge. Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“If you lack the iron and the fuzz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked. The dull and prosaic will be granted adventures that will dice their central nervous systems like an onion, romantic dreamers will end up in the rope yard. You may protest that it is too much to ask of an uneducated fifteen-year-old girl that she defy her family, her society, her weighty cultural and religious heritage in order to pursue a dream that she doesn't really understand. Of course it is asking too much. The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“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, Another Roadside Attraction

“It doesn't matter how sensitive you are or how damn smart and educated you are, if you're not both at the same time, if your heart and your brain aren't connected, aren't working together harmoniously, well, you're just hopping through life on one leg. You may think you're walking, you may think you're running a damn marathon, but you're only on a hop trip. The connections gotta be maintained.”
― Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito

“You're better equipped for this world than I am," she said. "I'm always trying to change the world. You know how to live in it.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful...”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“Ellen Cherry was from the south and had good manners. She didn´t have any panties on, but she had good manners.”
― Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

“We're making it up. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.”
― Tom Robbins

“Among our egocentric sad-sacks, despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation.”
― Tom Robbins, Wild Ducks Flying Backward

“Your perspective on life comes from the cage you were held captive in.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Never give up on someone with a mental illness. When "I" is replaced by "We", illness becomes wellness.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The weak thrive on indulgence.”
― Dan Groat, A Punctual Paymaster

“... a society devoted to self-destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“The taste for luxuries increases with marvelous rapidity under indulgence.
("A Night In An Old Castle")”
― George Payne Rainsford James, Reign of Terror: Great Victorian Horror Stories

“she wondered how she could have spent all that money and have nothing but clothes and accessories and a long list of men she never wanted to see again to show for it”
― Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters

“Sharpen and trust your judgement: learn when spending is a shrewd investment and when it is merely an indulgence”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“When money realizes that it is in good hands, it wants to stay and multiply in those hands.”
― Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability

“Every month when the bills came in, there was trouble. Mother seemed to have no great extravagances. But she loved pretty things. She had a passion for china, for instance. She saw hundreds of beautiful cups and saucers that it was hard to walk away from and leave. She knew she couldn't buy them, and mustn't, but every so often she did. No one purchase seemed large by itself, but they kept mounting up, and Father declared that she bought more china than the Windsor Hotel.”
― Clarence Day Jr., Life with Father

“Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can't figure out what from.”
― Mae West