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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

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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
Ready
Security
Dies
Free
Give
Live
Paradox
Must
Fully
Giving
Therefore

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The scientist keeps the romantic honest, and the romantic keeps the scientist human.
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True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.
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Death is simple. Life is messy. Give me life, the more complicated the better.
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My life is not merely a public phenomenon, it is a solitary adventure as well.
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I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.
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And it rained a fever. And it rained a silence. And it rained a sacrifice. And it rained a miracle. And it rained sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem.
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The very act of creation requires such focused concentration that vast areas of knowledge may be completely overlooked. Well, so what? There is no evidence that generalized skills are in any way superior to specialized brilliance.
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Dreams don't come true. Dreams are true.
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Violence stinks no matter which side of it you're on. But now and then there's nothing left to do but hit the other person over the head with a frying pan.
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Employing women as my primary protagonists has allowed me to step outside of myself, to distance myself from my own personality, far more easily than were I to look at events from a masculine perspective.
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If complexity doesn't beat you, paradox will.
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Survival is not important. What matters is how you survive.
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Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.
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The only authority I respect is the one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime.
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To achieve the impossible it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.
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Madame Lily Devalier always asked Where are you? in a way that insinuated that there were only two places on earth one could be: New Orleans and somewhere ridiculous.
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Our greatest human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.
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Growing up is a trap, snapped Dr. Robbins. When they tell you to shut up, they mean stop talking. When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. Reach a nice level plateau and settle there, predictable and unchanging, no longer a threat.
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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.
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Much scientific truth proved to be as hypothetical as poetic allegory. The relationshiip of those rod-connected blue and red balls to an actual atomic structure was about the same as the relationship of Christianity to the fish or the Lamb.
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