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The trickster's function is to break taboos, create mischief, stir things up. In the end, the trickster gives people what they really want, some sort of freedom.

Tom Robbins

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Tom Robbins
Age: 92
Born: 1932
Born: July 22
Author
Autobiographer
Biographer
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Blowing Rock
North Carolina
Thomas Eugene Robbins
Giving
Mischief
Really
Function
Things
Gives
People
Create
Trickster
Sort
Tricksters
Break
Taboos
Freedom
Stir
Ends
Taboo

More quotes by Tom Robbins

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I don't have a very high opinion, actually, of the world of criticism - or the practice of criticism. I think I admire art criticism, criticism of painting and sculpture, far more than I do that of say films and books, literary or film criticism. But I don't much like the practice. I think there are an awful lot of bad people in it.
Tom Robbins
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Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing.
Tom Robbins
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The winter passed as slowly and peacefully as a boa constrictor digesting a valium addict.
Tom Robbins
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Hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you're brown, you'll find out you're blue. As blue as indigo. And you know what that means. Indigo. Indigoing. Indigone.
Tom Robbins
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Minds were made for blowing.
Tom Robbins
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Purpose! Purposes are for animals with a hell of a lot more dignity than the human race! Just hop on that strange torpedo and ride it to wherever it's going.
Tom Robbins
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Heaven is living in your hopes and Hell is living in your fears. It's up to each individual which one he chooses.
Tom Robbins
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Bland writing - timid, antiseptic, vanilla writing - is nearly as unhealthy as the brutal and dark. Instead of sipping, say, elixir, nectar, tequila, or champagne, the reader is invited to slurp lumpy milk or choke on the author's dust bunnies.
Tom Robbins
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Cant you understand that romanticism is no more an enemy of science than mysticism is? In fact, romanticism and science are good for each other. The scientist keeps the romantic honest and the romantic keeps the scientist human.
Tom Robbins
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It's personal freedom, not hundred dollar bills that lights the soul's cigar.
Tom Robbins
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I believed in looking at people as individuals, not in groups. I hated groups still do. And I saw particularly the university, the university artists really acted as a group. The others didn't so much, but the university people took advantage of that and behaved like a group, rather than as individuals. They had a lot of power that way.
Tom Robbins
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Maybe most people were fundamentally contradictory. The real people at any rate.
Tom Robbins
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Magic things are fond of deceptions.
Tom Robbins
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Dreams don't come true. Dreams are true.
Tom Robbins
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Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them 'deadlines.'
Tom Robbins
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In East of Eden, John Steinbeck wrote that there's never been a great creative collaboration. When the Beatles first burst on the scene, I thought they were proving him wrong. Later, we learned that Lennon and McCartney had each composed their pop masterpieces separately, individually. So it goes.
Tom Robbins
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Rules such as Write what you know, and Show, don't tell, while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.
Tom Robbins
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The Japanese have become so smitten with the Western condiment - its texture as silky as a kimono, its tang as understated as the tang of Zen - that today they have a word for mayonnaise junkie: mayora.
Tom Robbins
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If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill-take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edges of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic.
Tom Robbins
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Zippers are primal and modern at the very same time. On the one hand, your zipper is primitive and reptilian, on the other, mechanical and slick. A zipper is where the Industrial Revolution meets the Cobra Cult.
Tom Robbins