Taylor Rutter > Taylor's Quotes

“Our great human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.”
― Tom Robbins, Wild Ducks Flying Backward

“Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable.”
― Tom Robbins

“To live fully, one must be free, but to be free one must give up security. Therefore, to live one must be ready to die. How's that for a paradox?”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Of the Seven Dwarfs, the only one who shaved was Dopey. That should tell us something about the wisdom of shaving.”
― Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

“I've sucked way too much cement for this year. Bad juju rising off them city sidewalks. I need to babble with a brook or two, inhale starlight, make friends with some trees.”
― Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

“Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere - the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“My desire was no less than before, you understand, but I no longer identified with the desire. Perhaps that is why taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of those desires.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“All a person can do in this life is gather about him his integrity, his imagination, and his individuality – and with these ever with him, out front and in sharp focus, leap into the dance of experience.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Reality is subjective, and there’s an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as ‘important’ only if ‘tis sober and severe. Sure and still you’re right about your Cheerful Dum, only they’re not so much happy as lobotomized. But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous. 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 o’ self-indulgence.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“salvation is for the feeble, that's what I think. I don't want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“We only rise above mediocrity when there's something at stake. p. 174”
― Tom Robbins

“Minds were made for blowing.”
― Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

“There is evidence that the honoree [Leonard Cohen] might be privy to the secret of the universe, which, in case you're wondering, is simply this: Everything is connected. Everything. Many, if not most, of the links are difficult to determine. The instrument, the apparatus, the focused ray that can uncover and illuminate those connections is language.”
― Tom Robbins, Wild Ducks Flying Backward

“The Divine was expansive, but religion was reductive. Religion attempted to reduce the Divine to a knowable quantity with which mortals might efficiently deal, to pigeonhole it once and for all so that we never had to reevaluate it. With hammers of cant and spikes of dogma, we crucified and crucified again, trying to nail to our stationary altars the migratory light of the world.”
― Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

“The purpose of art is to provide what life does not.”
― Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction

“what bothers me today is the lack of, well, i guess you'd call it authentic experience. so much is a sham. so much is artificial, synthetic, watered-down, and standardized...we're standardizing people, their goals, their ideas. the sham is everywhere.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“It is more important to be free than to be happy.”
― Tom Robbins

“I've lived most of my adult life outside the law, and never have I compromised with authority. But neither have I gone out and picked fights with authority. That's stupid. They’re waiting for that; they invite it; it helps keep them powerful. Authority is to be ridiculed, outwitted and avoided. And it is fairly easy to do all three. If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, act lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, that’s perfectly valid—but don’t go out trying to sell your beliefs to the System. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“If every time we choose a turd, society, at a great expense, simply allows us to redeem it for a pepperoni, then not only will we never learn to make smart choices, we will also surrender the freedom to choose, because a choice without consequences is no choice at all.”
― Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

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

“Beer does not satisfy magic, however. So the magic ordered a round of Harvey Wallbangers. But it takes more than vodka to fuel magic. It takes risks. It takes EXTREMES.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“The Divine was beyond description, beyond knowing, beyond comprehension. To say that the Divine was Creation divided by Destruction was as close as one could come to definition. But the puny of soul, the dull of wit, weren't content with that. They wanted to hang a face on the Divine. They went so far as to attribute petty human emotions (anger, jealousy, etc) to it, not stopping to realize that if God were a being, even a supreme being, our prayers would have bored him to death long ago.”
― Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

“Soul is not even that Crackerjack prize that God and Satan scuffle over after the worms have all licked our bones. That's why, when we ponder--as sooner or later each of us must--exactly what we ought to be doing about our soul, religion is the wrong, if conventional, place to turn. Religion is little more than a transaction in which troubled people trade their souls for temporary and wholly illusionary psychological comfort--the old give-it-up-in-order-to-save-it routine. Religions lead us to believe that the soul is the ultimate family jewel and that in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in their vaults, or at least insure it against fire theft. They are mistaken.”
― Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito

“Peeple of zee wurl, relax”
― Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

“there are countless ways to live upon this tremendous sphere in mirth and good health, and probably only one way - the industrialized, urbanized, herding way - to live here stupidly, and man has hit upon that one wrong way”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Life is like a stew, you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the top.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“In the beginning was the thing. And one thing led to another.”
― Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

“the greatest men that ever live pass away unknown. they put forth no claims for themselves, establish no schools of systems in their name. they never create or stir but just melt down into love”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Passion isn't a path through the woods. Passion is the woods. It's the deepest, wildest part of the forest; the grove where the fairies still dance and obscene old vipers snooze in the boughs. Everybody but the most dried up and dysfunctional is drawn to the grove and enchanted by its mysteries, but then they just can't wait to call in the chain saws and bulldozers and replace it with a family-style restaurant or a new S and L. That's the payoff, I guess. Safety. Security. Certainty. Yes, indeed. Well, remember this, pussy latte: we're not involved in a 'relationship,' you and I, we're involved in a collision. Collisions don't much lend themselves to secure futures...”
― Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

“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