Cody Stewart

“FISH CANNOT CARRY GUNS! If we abandoned that, we entered the paradoxes, and, finally, death. Stupid as our motto sounded, we had fabricated in it the insight we needed. There was nothing more to know.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

“The economic world, the world of the equities markets, just seemed like a perfect foil, the ideal backdrop against which to contrast this story about legendary amphibians from outer space, because everything these days is all about money. In this book (Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas) I'm hoping to illustrate that there not only are far more important things than money, but there are far more interesting things. (from NPR Interviews edited by Robert Siegel)”
― Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

“Naturally, it is too good to be true. Diamond's idea of helping you with your job is to lecture you on the obsolete and retrograde nature of salaried employment. He goes on at length, in his constricted nasal manner, about how, in our social history, jobs are an aberration, a flash in the pan. Human beings have been on earth for a million years, he claims (you think he's mistaken about that), but have only had jobs for the past five hundred years (that doesn't sound right, either), an inconsequential period, relatively speaking. People have always worked, he explains, but they have only held jobs with wages and employers and vacations and pink slips--for a very short time.”
― Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

“And what is your faith, exactly, Mr. Switters? What do you believe in?”

“Umm. Well. I try not to.”

“You try not to believe?”

“That’s right. I’m on the run from the Killer B’s.”

“Pardon? What have killer bees to do with? …”

“B for Belief. B for Belonging. The B’s that lead to most of the killing in the world. If you don’t Belong among us, then you’re our inferior, or our enemy, or both; and you can’t Belong with us unless you Believe what we Believe. Maybe not even then, but it certainly helps. Our religion, our party, our tribe, our town, our school, our race, our nation. Believe. Belong. Behave. Or Be damned.”

“But human beings have—”

“A need to belong somewhere, to believe in something? Yeah, Sister—if I may still call you that—they seem to. It’s virtually genetic. I’m on guard against it, and it still overtakes me. The concern is that we may annihilate ourselves before we can evolve, or mutate, beyond it; but you may rest assured that, even if we survive, as long as we’re driven to Belong and Believe, we’ll never be at peace, and we’ll never be free.”
― Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates