Tom Robbins
American novelist.
Suppose the neutral angels were able to talk to Yahweh and Lucifer- God and Satan, to use their popular titles- into settling out of court. What would be the terms of the compromise? Specifically, how would they divide the assets of their earthly kingdom? Would God be satisfied to take loaves and fishes and itty-bitty thimbles of Communion wine, while allowing Satan to have the redeye Gravy, eighteen ounce New York steak, and buckets of chilled champagne? Would God really accept twice-a-month lovemaking for procreative purposes and give Satan the all-night, no-holds-barred, nasty "can't-get-enough-of-you" hot-as-hell fucks?
In the quiet ache of the evening, Alobar listened to his calluses grow.
There are essential and inessential insanities. The latter are solar in character, the former are linked to the moon.
Twenty candles on a cake. Twenty Camels in a pack. Twenty months in the federal pen. Twenty shots of tequila down a young girl's gullet. Twenty centuries since Our Lord's last pratfall, and after all that time we still don't know where passion goes when it goes.
Who knows how to make love stay? Tell love you are going to the Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half. It will stay. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.
Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense.
If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done.
The shaman lives outside the social system, refusing to have any part of it. Yet he seems to connect the populace to the heavens and the earth far more directly than the priest.
"Good luck to you, pal. That's a search these days."
A lot of progress was being made there at MIT. Those guys had molecules jumping through hoops like poodles in a circus.
I journey to the east, where I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners.
"What is it that separates human beings from the so called lower animals? Well as I see it, it's exactly one half dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism-as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glow-worms or raccoons-Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake. Now, since those are the features that define a human being, it follows that the extent to which someone is lacking in those qualities is the extent to which he or she is less than human. Capisce?"
It couldn't have been Pan's output alone because Alobar's testicles were as flat and juiceless as trampled grapes.
Midnight, when the monotonous tick-tock of diurnal progress is for one throbbing moment replaced by the cool but smokey honk of a saxophone, alternately seductive and threatening. Midnight. The black growth on the clock face that has to be biopsied every twenty-four hours to see whether it is malignant or benign.
There are only two mantras... yum and yuk. Mine is yum."
...to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on heaven is to create hell.
"In the end, we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that's being continually retold in an accent too thick and too strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke. The soul is its punchline."
Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them 'deadlines'.
I'll never write another novel on an electric typewriter. I'd rather use a sharp stick and a little pile of dogshit.
...the natural process of aging, which according to Dr. Wiggs Dannyboy, is so unnaturally cruel that only man could have ordained it — neither nature nor God would stoop so low.