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we've produced a generation of spiritual panhandlers, begging for coins of wisdom, banging like bums on every closed door...if an old man moves into a shack or a cave and lets his beard grow, people will flock from miles around just to read his no trespassing sign

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
Men
Grow
Produced
Flocks
Like
Grows
Moves
Cave
People
Wisdom
Sign
Begging
Read
Miles
Coins
Bums
Spiritual
Generation
Beard
Trespassing
Moving
Door
Caves
Shack
Around
Doors
Lets
Flock
Every
Generations
Closed
Banging

More quotes by 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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When I sit down to write, I just let the goose out of the bottle.
Tom Robbins
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It was autumn, the springtime of death. Rain spattered the rotting leaves, and a wild wind wailed. Death was singing in the shower. Death was happy to be alive. The fetus bailed out without a parachute. It landed in the sideline Astroturf, so upsetting the cheerleaders that for the remained of the afternoon their rahs were more like squeaks.
Tom Robbins
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The trouble with the fast lane is that all the movement is horizontal. And I like to go vertical sometimes.
Tom Robbins
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It is what it is. You are what you it. There are no mistakes.
Tom Robbins
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Very few people can write in a crowd. This is a very solitary occupation. I have known people more talented than me who never made it. And the primary reason was always that they couldn't stand to be alone for several hours a day. Any writer worth anything has mastered the art. The art of solitude.
Tom Robbins
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It's hard to say who's a greater threat to the world, an ambitious CEO with a big ad budget or a crafty cleric with an obsolete Bible verse.
Tom Robbins
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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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Each time we exhale, the world ends when we inhale, there can be, if we allow it, rebirth and spiritual renewal. It all transpires inside of us. In our consciousness, in our hearts. All the time.
Tom Robbins
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A mockingbird... was heard to blend the songs of 32 different kinds of birds into a 10 minute performance, a virtuoso display that served no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.
Tom Robbins
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I started writing when I was 5 years old. I would dictate stories to my mother, and she would copy them in a scrapbook. If she changed anything to make it, in her opinion, better, I would throw a tantrum.
Tom Robbins
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I go into a gallery or museum, and I realize that I don't have to formulate any opinions if I don't want to. I don't have to think this thing through and write about it at any great length. I can think about it if I want to if not, I can just walk out. So I can enjoy painting really a lot more than I could when I had that sort of pressure.
Tom Robbins
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Rivers are the primal highways of life. From the crack of time, they had borne men's dreams, and in their lovely rush to elsewhere, fed our wanderlust, mimicked our arteries, and charmed our imaginations in a way the static pond or vast and savage ocean never could.
Tom Robbins
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Often, moreover, it is...that aspect of our being that society finds eccentric, ridiculous, or disagreeable, that holds our sweet waters, our secret well of happiness, the key to our equanimity in malevolent climes.
Tom Robbins
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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
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When a culture is being dumbed down as effectively as ours is, its narrative arts (literature, film, theatre) seem to vacillate between the brutal and the bland, sometimes in the same work.
Tom Robbins
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In Seattle, I soon found that my radical ideas and aesthetic explorations - ideas and explorations that in Richmond, Virginia, might have gotten me stoned to death with hush puppies - were not only accepted but occasionally applauded.
Tom Robbins
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The female characters in my books tend to be independent, frisky, spunky, witty, emotionally strong, erotically daring, spiritually oriented and intellectually generous in short, the kind of women I admire in real life.
Tom Robbins
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Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.
Tom Robbins
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The pervasive brutality in current fiction - the death, disease, dysfunction, depression, dismemberment, drug addiction, dementia, and dreary little dramas of domestic discord - is an obvious example of how language in exploitative, cynical or simply neurotic hands can add to the weariness, the darkness in the world.
Tom Robbins