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Tom Robbins

Thomas Eugene Robbins (born 22 July 1932) is an American novelist. His novels are complex, often wild stories with strong social undercurrents and obscure but well-researched details.

(1971)

 * When a man confines an animal in a cage, he assumes ownership of that animal. But an animal is an individual; it cannot be owned. When a man tries to own an individual, whether that individual be another man, an animal or even a tree, he suffers the psychic consequences of an unnatural act.

 * There is no such thing as a weird human being. It's just that some people require more understanding than others.

 * The only meat in the world sweeter, hotter, and pinker than Amanda's twat is Carolina barbecue.

 * Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective.

 * The function of the artist is to provide what life does not.

 * Logic only gives man what he needs. Magic gives him what he wants.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976)

 * Sometimes those things that attract the most attention to us are the things that afford us the greatest privacy.

 * Fire is the reuniting of matter with oxygen. If one bears that in mind, every blaze may be seen as a reunion, an occasion of chemical joy.

 * So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success.

 * Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.

 * Of course I'm inconsistent! Only logicians and cretins are consistent!
 * spoken by the character "The Chink".

 * If we're ever going to get the world back on a natural footing, back in tune with natural rhythyms, if we're going to nurture the Earth and protect it and have fun with it and learn from it — which is what mothers do with their children — then we've got to put technology (an aggressive masculine system) in its proper place, which is that of a tool to be used sparingly, joyfully, gently and only in the fullest cooperation with nature. Nature must govern technology, not the other way around.

 * Love is dope, not chicken soup.

 * I set an example. That's all anyone can do. I'm sorry the cowgirls didn't pay better attention, but I couldn't force them to notice me. I've lived most of my entire adult life outside the law, and never have I compromised with authority. But neither have I gone out and picked fights with authority. That's stupid. They're waiting for that; they invite it; it helps keep them powerful. Authority is to be ridiculed, outwitted and avoided. And it's fairly easy to do all three. If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, acting lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, that's perfectly valid — but don't go out trying to sell your beliefs to the system. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself.

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

 * There are only two mantras... yum and yuk. Mine is yum.
 * Phase II, Ch. 21.

 * I’m not quite twenty, but, thanks to you, I’ve learned something that many women these days never learn: Prince Charming really is a toad. And the Beautiful Princess has halitosis. The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love. Wouldn’t that be the way to make love stay?
 * Leigh-Cheri to Bernard, in Phase III, Ch. 46.

 * Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words “make” and “stay” become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.
 * Bernard to Leigh-Cheri, in Phase III, Ch. 46

 * The following quotes should have chapter citations added to them:

 * How can one person be more real than any other? Well some people do hide and others seek. Maybe those who are hiding — escaping encounters, avoiding surprises, protecting their property, ignoring their fantasies, restricting their feelings, sitting out the Pan pipe hootchy-kootch of experience — maybe those people, people who won't talk to rednecks, or if they're rednecks won't talk to intellectuals, people who are afraid to get their shoes muddy or their noses wet, afraid to eat what they crave, afraid to drink Mexican water, afraid to bet a long shot to win, afraid to hitchhike, jaywalk, honky-tonk, cogitate, osculate, levitate, rock it, bop it, sock it, or bark at the moon, maybe such people are simply inauthentic, and maybe the jackleg humanist who says differently is due to have his tongue fried on the hot slabs of liars hell. Some folks hide and some folks seek,and seeking when its mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous, can be a form of hiding. But there are folks who want to know and aren't afraid to look, and won't turn tail should they find it — and if they never do, they'll have a good time anyway, because nothing, neither the terrible truth, nor the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of earth's sweet gas.

 * It's not men who limit women, it's not straights who limit gays, it's not whites who limit blacks. What limits people is lack of character. What limits people is that they don't have the fucking nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it.

 * Tequila, scorpion honey, harsh dew of the doglands, essence of Aztec, crema de cacti; tequila, oily and thermal like the sun in solution; tequila, liquid geometry of passion; Tequila, the buzzard God who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying virgins; tequila, firebug in the house of good taste; O tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate!”

 * There are essential and inessential insanities. The latter are solar in character, the former are linked to the moon. Inessential insanities are a brittle amalgamation of ambition, aggression, and pre-adolescent anxiety — garbage that should have been dumped long ago. Essential insanities are those impulses one instinctively senses are virtuous and correct, even though peers may regard them as coo-coo. Inessential insanities get one in trouble with one's self. Essential insanities get one in trouble with others. In fact, it may be essential. Poetry, the best of it, is lunar and is concerned with the essential insanities. Journalism is solar... and is devoted to the inessential.

 * Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning or an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that question is: "Who knows how to make love stay?".

 * When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on — series polygamy — until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimension to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.

 * On the campus of Outlaw College, professors of essential insanities would characterize the conflicting attitudes of Nina Jablonski and Leigh-Cheri as indicative of a general conflict between social idealism and romanticism. As any of the learned professors would explain, plied with sufficient tequila, no matter how fervently a romantic might support a movement, he or she eventually must withdraw from active participation in that movement because the group ethic — the supremacy of the organization over the individual — is an affront to intimacy. Intimacy is the principal source of the sugars with which this life is sweetened. It is absolutely vital to the essential insanities.

 * If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done.

 * Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.

 * I sense that novel of my dreams is in the Remington SL3 — although it writes much faster than I can spell.

 * This baby (the Remington SL3 typewriter) speaks electric Shakespeare at the slightest provocation and will rap out a page and a half if you just look at it hard.

 * There is a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like a part of the act.

 * Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

 * Her surname resembled a line from an optometrist's examination chart.

 * Hawaii made the mouth of her soul water.

 * They'd be no threat to me. I have a black belt in Haiku. And a black vest in the cleaners.

 * There are essential and inessential insanities. The latter are solar in character, the former are linked to the moon.

 * Sharks are the criminals of the sea. Dolphins are the outlaws.

 * She lunched on papaya poo poo or mango mu mu or some other fruity foo foo bursting with overripe tropical vowels.

 * There are two kinds of people in this world : those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.

 * He looked at her with that kind of painted-on seriousness that comedians shift into when they get their chance to play Hamlet.

 * The man and woman firmly shook hands. The solution to the overpopulation problem might rest in such handshakes.

 * A better world has gotta start somewhere. Why not with you and me?

 * If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.

 * They snuggled closer, and when they were as close as they could get without being behind one another, they commenced to kiss again.

 * This stuff's so fine Julius Caesar called for it with his dying breath. 'A toot, Brutus,' is what he said.

 * Something has got to hold it together. I'm saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue.

 * "I'll follow him to the ends of the earth," she sobbed. Yes, darling. But the earth doesn't have any ends. Columbus fixed that.

 * A rabbi's dog could score pork chops in the streets of Tel Aviv easier than Bernard could acquire tequila in King County Jail.

 * She tried out the chamber pot, although she really had nothing to contribute.

 * Any half-awake materialist well knows — that which you hold holds you.

 * The first time that she spread her legs for him it had been like opening her jaws for the dentist.

 * Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense.

 * I'll never write another novel on an electric typewriter. I'd rather use a sharp stick and a little pile of dogshit.

 * It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

 * Bernard Mickey Wrangle had developed a psychological test of his own. It was short, simple, and infallible. To administer the test, merely ask the subject to name his or her favorite Beatle. If you are at all familiar with the distinct separate public images of the four Beatles, then you'll recognize that the one chosen reveals as much about the subject's personality as most of us will ever hope to know.

 * Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano. It's not the tobacco we're after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.

 * "This is the way to burn," the fuse seemed to be saying to the more docile, slow-witted candlewick. "Brilliantly, ecstatically, irrepressibly. This is the way to burn."

 * 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.

 * 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.

 * They glared at her the way any intelligent persons ought to glare when what they need is a smoke, a bite, a cup of coffee, a piece of ass, or a good fast-paced story, and all they're getting is philosophy.

(1984)

 * It is so amusing the way that mortals misunderstand the shape, or shapes, of time. … In the realms of the ultimate, each person must figure out things for themselves. … Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.

 * Above the building, the sky recalled passages from Les Miserables, threadbare and gray.

 * Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.

 * Modern Romans insisted that there was only one god, a notion that struck Alobar as comically simplistic.

 * If you didn't serve the nasty fellow (God), the Romans would burn your house down. If you did serve him, you were called a Christian and got to burn other people's houses down.

 * 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.

 * In the quiet ache of the evening, Alobar listened to his calluses grow.

 * I journey to the east, where I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners.

 * You don't have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House.

 * Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air — moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh — felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing.

 * If you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropiate port you find yourself docked.

 * Let me see if I can put it in words that even the inebriated might understand.

 * She needed help, but God was in a meeting whenever she rang.

 * ... overdramatizing the word of God, turning the Scriptures into a cross between a German opera and a hockey game.

 * The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.

 * ...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.

 * My lunar sign is in Virgo. Every month when the moon is full, I'm driven to balance my checkbook and straighten up my apartment. I can't help myself. Instead of a werewolf I turn into an accountant.

 * Well, there's one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich.

 * There's probably no subject with quite so many conflictin' opinions about it as there are about food, and 'tis better to swap bubble gum with a rabid bulldog than challenge a single one o' the varyin' beliefs your average human holds about nutrition.

 * I deserve to be chained by night in a church basement without company o' cassette player if I'm not man enough to ask you for the teeniest, slightest brush of oral-muscular affaction.

 * Water! Of all liquids on Earth, the only one chosen for scrubbin' and flushin'. The liquid they rinse baby's nappies in, the fluid that floods the gutters o' this cloud-squeezer town; a single drop o' water discolors a glass of Irish, and you, false friend, are wantin' me to pour this abrasive substance into me defenseless body!

 * 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.

 * A sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised.

 * A lot of progress was being made there at MIT. Those guys had molecules jumping through hoops like poodles in a circus.

 * Most snoring is composed by Beethoven or Wagner, although a few times Wiggs had heard heavy metal rock performed on the somnambulate bassoon.

 * They were old enough to know better. Some of them were old enough to remember when old Macdonald had a farm.

 * To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

 * It couldn't have been Pan's output alone because Alobar's testicles were as flat and juiceless as trampled grapes.

 * The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.

Skinny Legs and All (1990)

 * ...to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on heaven is to create hell.

 * Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.

 * The winter passed as slowly and peacefully as a boa constrictor digesting a valium addict.

 * In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.

 * Of the seven deadly sins, lust is definitely the pick of the litter.

 * ...she recreated the mountains not as she had originally seen them but as she eventually chose to perceive them, not only a capacity to observe the world but a capacity to alter his or her observation of it — which, in the end, is the capacity to alter the world, itself. Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call "sages," and those who act upon it, we call "artists."

 * A person can't make a career out of somebody else's invective.

 * "Not naive," Conch Shell had corrected him, "He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear."

 * "Leave me in the night but please don't leave me in the dark"

 * "keep your eye on the ball, even if you cannot see the ball."

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)

 * Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them 'deadlines'.

 * It's a smile a girl could bring home to mother, if she had a mother; a smile a girl could pet like a pony, sip like a lemonade, hum like a popular tune; a smile a girl would feel safe with in a dark alley.

 * 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.

 * Night, when tangos play on the nurse's radio and rat poison sings its own hot song behind the cellar door. Night, when the long snake feeds, when the black sedan cruises the pleasure districts, when neon flickers "Free at Last" in a dozen lost languages, and shapes left over from childhood move furtively behind the moon-dizzy boughs of the fir.

 * There's no such thing as security in this life, sweetheart; and the sooner you accept that fact, the better off you'll be. The person who strives for security will never be free. The person who believes that she's found security will never reach paradise. What she mistakes for security is purgatory. You know what purgatory is, Gwendolyn? It's the waiting room, it's the lobby. Not only does she have the wrong libretto, she's stuck in the lobby where she can't see the show.

 * ...that she was the one who'd made friends with the Snake, that she'd let it lick the blood of her first menstruation, that she … ooo eee, that she … ooo eee, that she … ooo, eee, that she now knew what the Serpent knew.

 * There are landscapes in which we feel above us not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed, is seen, although in such settings the sky is invariably immense. There is a place between the cerebrum and the stars where sky stops and space commenses, and should we find ourselves on a particular prairie or mountaintop at a particular hour [...] our relationship with sky thins and loosens while our connection with space becomes as solid as bone.

 * In this room, the salamander was squashed between the pages of the rhyming dictionary, thereby changing poetry forever. Here, Salome walked around with a big red fish held high up over her head. Old Father spanked her with a ballet slipper, sending her to bed without milk or honey. Dance was changed in this room, too.

 * So this, then, is the chamber of the hootchy-kootch. Its bathtub full of orchids. Its closet full of smoke.

 * Your friend insults the homeless by giving them no credit for having made the decisions that shaped their lives, and demeans them further by declaring them powerless to alter their situations. There’re many ways, my dear, to victimize people. The most insidious way is to persuade them that they’re victims.

 * All Uncle Larry is saying is that individuals have to accept responsibility for their own bad choices. If every time we choose a turd, society, at great expense, simply allows us to redeem it for a pepperoni, then not only will we never learn to make smart choices, we will also surrender the freedom to choose, because a choice without consequences is no choice at all. Maybe it boils down to the premium we want to place on liberty.

 * I’m acquainted with a, uh, gentleman who claims that the extent to which a society focuses on the needs of its lowest common denominator is the extent to which that society’ll be mired in mediocrity. Whereas, if we would aim the bulk of our support at the brightest, most talented, most virtuous instead, then they would have the wherewithal to solve a lot of our problems, to uplift the whole culture, enlighten it or something, so that eventually there wouldn’t be so many losers and weaklings impeding evolution and dragging the whole species down. He claims that martyrs like you just perpetuate human misery by catering to it. He believes individuals have to take responsibility for their own lives and accept the consequences of their choices.

 * You can love ‘em till your well runs dry, Belford, but you can never love ‘em enough, and you know it. No matter how much others might love you, you can’t love yourself unless you’re in charge of your own actions, and you’ll never take charge as long as you can get away with blaming your shortcomings and misfortunes on your family or society or your race or gender or Satan or whatever…

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)

 * People of zee wurl, Relax!

 * Nostalgia's nice enough in little bitty doses, it puts personal peach fuzz on the hard ass of history.

 * There's birth, there's death, and in between there's maintenance.

 * On the poor use of grammar It's a matter of usage. If a house is off-plumb and rickety and lets in the wind, you blame the mason, not the bricks. Our words are up to the job. It's our syntax that's limiting.

 * "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."

 * "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?"

 * "And what would our ideas of God, of religion, be like if they had come to us through the minds of women? Ever think of that?"

 * "The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy."

 * Moreover, given the unpleasant option of having to associate with either the self-satisfied beautiful or the self-pitying plain, he'd choose the former every time because beauty could sometimes transcend smugness whereas self-pity just made ugliness all the more unattractive.

 * 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?

 * "The Devil doesn't make us do anything. The Devil, for example, doesn't make us mean. Rather, when we're mean, we make the Devil. Literally. Our actions create him. Conversely, when we behave with compassion, generosity, and grace, we create God in the world."

 * "For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass."

 * "Accept that you're a pimple and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way lies grace — and maybe even glory."

 * "Things. Cosas. Things attach themselves like leeches to the human soul, then they bleed out the sweetness and the music and the primordial joy of being unencumbered upon the land."

 * "I'm looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis."

 * I've always assumed that every time a child is born, the Divine reenters the world. Okay? That's the meaning of the Christmas story. And every time that child's purity is corrupted by society, that's the meaning of the Crucifixion story. Your man Jesus stands for that child, that pure spirit, and as its surrogate, he's being born and put to death again and again, over and over, every time we inhale and exhale, not just at the vernal equinox and on the twenty-fifth of December.

 * "Good luck to you, pal. That's a search these days."

High Times interview (2002)

 * "The Green Man : Tom Robbins" interviewed by Gregory Daurer, in High Times (12 June 2002)

 * I'm descended from a long line of preachers and policemen. Now, it's common knowledge that cops are congenital liars, and evangelists spend their lives telling fantastic tales in such a way as to convince otherwise rational people that they're factual. So, I guess I come by my narrative inclinations naturally. Moreover, I grew up in the rural South, where, although television has been steadily destroying it, there has always existed a love of colorful verbiage.

 * Usually, my witticisms are composed on the spot. They're simply intrinsic; an inseparable, integral, organic part of my writing process — doubtlessly because humor is an inseparable, integral part of my philosophical worldview. The comic sensibility is vastly, almost tragically, underrated by Western intellectuals. Humor can be a doorway into the deepest reality, and wit and playfulness are a desperately serious transcendence of evil. My comic sense, although deliberately Americanized, is, in its intent, much closer related to the crazy wisdom of Zen monks and the goofy genius of Taoist masters than it is to, say, the satirical gibes on Saturday Night Live. It has both a literary and a metaphysical function.

 * The key to self-generated happiness (the only reliable kind) is the refusal to take oneself too seriously.
 * "The Green Man : Tom Robbins" interviewed by Gregory Daurer, in High Times (12 June 2002).

Wild Ducks Flying Backward (2005)
'''There is evidence that the honoree might be privy to the secret of the universe, which, in case you’re wondering, is simply this: everything is connected. Everything.''' Many, if not most, of the links are difficult to determine. The instrument, the apparatus, the focused ray that can uncover and illuminate those connections is language. And just as a sudden infatuation often will light up a person’s biochemical sky more pyrotechnically than any deep, abiding attachment, so an unlikely, unexpected burst of linguistic imagination will usually reveal greater truths than the most exacting scholarship. In fact, the poetic image may be the only device remotely capable of dissecting romantic desire, let alone disclosing the hidden mystical essence of the material world. Cohen is a master of the quasi-surrealistic phrase, of the “illogical” line that speaks so directly to the unconscious that surface ambiguity is transformed into ultimate, if fleeting, comprehension: comprehension of the bewitching nuances of sex and the bewildering assaults of culture.
 * It is their desire to honor L. Cohen, songwriter, that has prompted a delegation of our brightest artists to climb, one by one, joss sticks smoldering, the steep and salty staircase in the Tower of Song.
 * Liner notes for the Leonard Cohen tribute album Tower of Song (1995).

 * Nobody can say the word “naked” as nakedly as Cohen. He makes us see the markings where the pantyhose have been.
 * Liner notes for the Leonard Cohen tribute album Tower of Song (1995).

 * To pragmatists, the letter Z is nothing more than a phonetically symbolic glyph, a minor sign easily learned, readily assimilated, and occasionally deployed in the course of a literate life. To cynics, Z is just an S with a stick up its butt.

 * All animals copulate but only humans osculate. Parakeets rub beaks? Sure they do, but only little old ladies who murder schoolchildren with knitting needles to steal their lunch money so that they can buy fresh kidneys to feed overweight kitty cats would place bird billing in the realm of the true kiss.

The Syntax of Sorcery (2012)

 * "The Syntax of Sorcery: An Interview with Tom Robbins" (2012) by Tony Vigorito in Reality Sandwich

Most of this apocalyptic noise appears to be just wishful thinking on the part of people who find life too messy and uncertain for comfort, let alone for serenity and mirth. '''The truth, from my perspective, is that the world, indeed, is ending – and is also being reborn. It's been doing that all day, every day, forever. 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.''' Otherwise, ours is an old, old story with an interesting new wrinkle. Throughout most of our history, nothing – not flood, famine, plague, or new weapons – has endangered humanity one-tenth as much as the narcissistic ego, with its self-aggrandizing presumptions and its hell-hound spawn of fear and greed. The new wrinkle is that escalating advances in technology are nourishing the narcissistic ego the way chicken manure nourishes a rose bush, while exploding worldwide population is allowing its effects to multiply geometrically. Here's an idea: let's get over ourselves, buy a cherry pie, and go fall in love with life.
 * Christians, and some Jews, claim we're in the "end times," but they've been saying this off and on for more than two thousand years. According to Hindu cosmology, we're in the Kali Yuga, a dark period when the cow of history is balanced precariously on one leg, soon to topple. Then there are our new-age friends who believe that this December we're in for a global cage-rattling which, once the dust has settled, will usher in a great spiritual awakening.

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. 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. Less apparent is that 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.
 * Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally. The word "grammar," like its sister word "glamour," is actually derived from an old Scottish word that meant "sorcery." When we were made to diagram sentences in high school, we were unwittingly being instructed in syntax sorcery, in wizardry. We were all enrolled at Hogwarts. Who knew?

'''Cultural institutions by and large share one primary objective: herd control. Even when ostensibly benign, their propensity for manipulation, compartmentalization, standardization and suppression of potentially disruptive behavior or ideas, has served to freeze the evolution of consciousness practically in its tracks.''' In technological development, in production of material goods and creature comforts, we've challenged the very gods, but psychologically, emotionally, we're scarcely more than chimpanzees with bulldozers, baboons with big bombs.
 * I'll say this much: virtually every advancement made by our species since civilization first peeked out of its nest of stone has been initiated by lone individuals, mavericks who more often than not were ignored, mocked, or viciously persecuted by society and its institutions. Society in general maintains such a vested interest in its cozy habits and solidified belief systems that it had rather die – or kill – than entertain change. Consider how threatened religious fundamentalists of all faiths remain to this day by science in general and Darwin in particular.

 * Genius may stand on the shoulders of giants, but it stands alone.

 * We humans have always defined ourselves by narration. What's happening today is that we're allowing multi-national corporations to tell our stories for us. The theme of corporate stories (and millions drink them in every day) seldom varies: to be happy you must consume, to be special you must conform. Absurd, obviously, yet our identities have become so fragile, so elusive, that we seem content to let advertisers provide us with their version of who we are, to let them recreate us in their image: a cookie-cutter image based on market research, shallow sociology, and insidious lies. Individualism is bad for business – though absolutely necessary for freedom, progressive knowledge, and any possible interface with the transcendent. And yes, it's entirely possible to function as a free-thinking individual without succumbing to narcissism..

 * What we, thanks to Jung, call "synchronicity" (coincidence on steroids), Buddhists have long known as "the interpenetration of realities." Whether it's a natural law of sorts or simply evidence of mathematical inevitability (an infinite number of monkeys locked up with an infinite number of typewriters eventually producing Hamlet, not to mention Tarzan of the Apes), it seems to be as real as it is eerie.

Democracy? Yep, oddly enough. The counterculture light was so bright it began to attract moths (people who sadly were not intellectually or spiritually prepared to meaningfully assimilate transformative multi-dimensional data streams from hyperspace) and stinging stink bugs (the thugs that invariably invade every utopia) in such great numbers that they eventually crowded out the butterflies (the educated middle class truth-seekers who switched on the light in the first place). That's an oversimplification, of course, but it's good to bear in mind that like it or not, enlightenment has always been, even in a golden age, pretty much limited to an elite. In America, the relatively finite psychedelic culture was shoved aside by the burgeoning boogie culture, whose drugs of choice were booze, speed, and cocaine; and whose goal was not to attain spiritual bliss, deeper understanding, or an end to war and repression but rather to get thoroughly fucked up.
 * Although I participated enthusiastically in the sixties psychedelic revolution, and tried to mimic it – its trappings, its mythology, its silliness, its profundity – in print in my first novel, I had nothing to do with its creation. Rather, it was the confluence of two disparate elements – acute socio-political dissatisfaction and pharmacological neo-shamanism – that precipitated it; and it was democracy, as much as ferocious opposition from both the right-wing and left-wing establishments, that caused it to eventually unravel.

 * Except in the areas of civil rights and medical marijuana, the legacy of the sixties counterculture has been largely superficial. Still, though the light has dimmed and gone underground, something in me would like to think the sixties phenomenon was a dress rehearsal for a grander, wider leap in consciousness yet to come. However, since Seafood Kabob is likely to win the Belmont Stakes before a psychic jailbreak of that magnitude materializes, my strategy is to try to live as if that day were already here.

 * Watts published a luminous book entitled The Wisdom of Insecurity that ought to be required reading for every high school senior. Watts elaborates beautifully on what I've learned from observation and personal experience: namely, that security is an illusion.

 * '''Just because something didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't true.

Quotes about Robbins

 * When he starts a novel, it works like this. First he writes a sentence. Then he rewrites it again and again, examining each word, making sure of its perfection, finely honing each phrase until it reverberates with the subtle texture of the infinite. Sometimes it takes hours. Sometimes an entire day is devoted to one sentence, which gets marked on and expanded upon in every possible direction until he is satisfied. Then, and only then, does he add a period.
 * Michael Dare, in "How to Write Like Tom Robbins" in The Spirit Of Writing : Classic and Contemporary Essays Celebrating the Writing Life (2001) edited by Mark Robert Waldman, p. 41.

 * Forty-odd years ago, there was a countercultural moment, a brief, shining moment, as it were, when the eyes of a generation glimpsed the Eden beneath the veil. However fleeting was this paradise, or however harsh has been its repression, its light nonetheless inspired a rowdy cohort of artists to carry its torch into the future. Tom Robbins is one of these unruly pioneers, and his frequently bestselling novels are so saturated in an uncontainable joie de vivre that they have remained virtually required reading throughout the years and decades since their initial publication.
 * Tony Vigorito, in "The Syntax of Sorcery: An Interview with Tom Robbins" (2012) in Reality Sandwich.

title: Tom Robbins


text:
Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott (born 10 April 1954) is an American novelist and non-fiction writer.

Quotes
* I try to write the books I would love to come upon, that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness—and that can make me laugh. When I am reading a book like this, I feel rich and profoundly relieved to be in the presence of someone who will share the truth with me, and throw the lights on a little, and I try to write these kinds of books. Books, for me, are medicine.
 * Originally posted to the Religion Blog of the Dallas Morning News in 2008.

 * ..I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life's work, and try to get hold of a giant panda.
 * Hard Laughter

 * 100 years from now? All new people.
 * All New People

 * You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
 * Traveling Mercies; on page 22 of Bird by Bird she attributes this to "my priest friend Tom"

 * Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison, and then waiting around for the rat to die.
 * Traveling Mercies

 * Laughter is carbonated holiness.
 * Plan B

 * The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for example, to go for a walk.
 * Plan B

 * When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader.
 * Bird by Bird

 * Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.
 * Bird by Bird

 * Joy is the best makeup.
 * Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith

 * Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.
 * Facebook post, 4/8/15

 * So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.
 * Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year

"The dressing-room encounter that made me get real about aging" The Washington Post (December 20, 2023)

 * Do I think the sky is falling? Sort of.

 * The game of life is hard, and a lot of us are playing hurt.

 * We know by a certain age the great palace lies of the culture — if you buy or do or achieve this or that, you will be happy and rich. Nope. Love and service make us rich.

 * She had come planning to swim, which I hadn’t as the water is too cold for me, and she took off all her clothes, right there and then. “Do you feel shy?” I asked as she walked to the bank. “Nope. This here is what I done got. This is what me being alive looks like now."

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Anne Lamott


text:
Dorothy Allison

Dorothy Allison (born April 11, 1949) is an American lesbian writer, speaker, and member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. She was raised in Greenville, South Carolina. She is legally blind in her right eye.

Her mother soon married and when Dorothy was 5, her step-father started sexually abusing her. This continued until she managed to tell a relative. Dorothy's mother quickly found out and stopped the abuse but managed to keep the family together.

Quotes

 * I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people. Neither is anyone I have ever cared deeply about.
 * Skin: Talking About Sex, Class And Literature
 * I want to write a great book — I want to make a difference — I want to have adventures and take enormous risks and be everything they say we are and not give a damn what anyone says.
 * Foreword to My Dangerous Desire: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home by Amber L. Hollibaugh, pg. xii.

title: Dorothy Allison


text:
User talk:Catamorphism~enwikiquote

Hi. Welcome to English Wikiquote. Enjoy! jni 11:58, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
 * To ask for help or to talk with another editor, visit our Village pump.
 * To browse Wikiquote, take a look at our browsing start page.
 * To sign with a date, write four tildes ( jni 11:58, 15 January 2006 (UTC) ) and save.
 * Before creating new articles, consult our guide. You may practice how to edit a page at Sandbox.
 * Be bold.

No personal attacks, assume good faith (and don't be disruptive)
Please familiarize yourself with these two rules. Also, your edits on the abortion page have been disruptive. For example: Mr. Grace
 * Please add only quotes about abortion.
 * Please do not remove verifiable portions of quotes that you don't like.
 * Please do not change the established very simple and neutral categories.
 * Please do not add edits from mystery people whose notoriety you cannot even explain when asked to do so.
 * Please do not complain and make accusations of bad faith and make personal attacks when you do any of these things and as a result your disruptive editing is checked.

Please do not remove quotes
Please refrain from removing relevant quotes that you do not like as you did here. Such disruptive editing is not helpful. Mr. Grace 12:25, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Warnings about policy violations
Such warnings belong on a users talk page. The user does NOT control content on their own talk page.

Temporary refrain from Abortion edits
I will shortly be reducing a permanent block on Mr. Grace to two weeks. During this time, I ask that, as the apparent primary opposer of his edits and arguments, you refrain from editing Abortion as well, so as not to take advantage of his absence. I have urged Mr Grace to demonstrate good-faith editing when he returns by attempting to work out a compromise with you and other "Abortion" editors so that we can remove the POV tag. If you have any questions, feel free to post them to my talk page. Thank you for your cooperation. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 16:48, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

 * I'll comply with that. Thanks for your help! BTW, to your list of reasons why Mr. Grace might be considered a troll, I'd also add his comments on my talk page (which I had reverted before, but am leaving there for now to avoid taking advantage of his being blocked). Someone who has received as many warnings from admins as Mr. Grace probably shouldn't be warning others about policy violations. Catamorphism 01:29, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

It certainly goes against the principle of not castng the first stone. I'm always amazed at folks who cite the very rules they routinely break, and demonstrate insufficient introspection to be aware of their hypocrisy. Of course, this makes it imperative for those dealing with such a person to be careful about their own actions. (Goodness knows I've made mistakes along these lines.) In that vein, I'd point out that Mr. Grace has a point about user talk-page texts, in that they ordinarily shouldn't be removed other than to archive or revert true vandalism. (I'm sure you know that, based on your experience with Wikipedia, on which you've obviously been extraordinarily busy!) On the other hand, I have rarely been so unfortunate as to have someone with oodles of time and an axe to grind make multiple angry postings to my talk page on a daily basis. It's just that removing their posts gives such angry editors a legitimate reason to gripe. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 02:01, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

I weighed in on the issue, supporting all of your contributions, but my advice will benefit you too.

Perma-link diff: http://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Mr._Grace&diff=180908&oldid=180514 (Scroll to the bottom, since I can't seem to get a table of contents to work on this page.) --GordonWattsDotCom 05:09, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Please follow the rules.
You have added NPOV tag to the abortion article despite offering no basis for the tag and making no suggestions for what you think would justify removing the tag. You did not even have the courtesy to comment on the talk page. Please see JefQ comments on the matter before taking unitlateral action in violation of the NPOV tag policy. Tags are temporary tools to make the article better, not to add your editorial opinion to the top of the page.

Also, please stop excising context from Amos' extremely unique religion-and-abortion quote. You can't just unilaterally decide that her extreme views on the topic be removed so as to make her opinion appear more palatable to readers.

You also removed one undeniably relevant abortion quote without explanation (the Colen quote) - that is a big no go.

Thanks for considering my input. I trust you want wikiquote to be a friendly and fair place. Adhering to the rules will make that more likely to be true.

139.139.161.12 08:19, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

Amos
Please see the abortion talk page regarding Amos' quote and NPOV tag. 139.139.161.12 22:18, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

Your account will be renamed
Hello,

The developer team at Wikimedia is making some changes to how accounts work, as part of our on-going efforts to provide new and better tools for our users like cross-wiki notifications. These changes will mean you have the same account name everywhere. This will let us give you new features that will help you edit and discuss better, and allow more flexible user permissions for tools. One of the side-effects of this is that user accounts will now have to be unique across all 900 Wikimedia wikis. See the announcement for more information.

Unfortunately, your account clashes with another account also called Catamorphism. To make sure that both of you can use all Wikimedia projects in future, we have reserved the name Catamorphism~enwikiquote that only you will have. If you like it, you don't have to do anything. If you do not like it, you can pick out a different name.

Your account will still work as before, and you will be credited for all your edits made so far, but you will have to use the new account name when you log in.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Yours, Keegan Peterzell Community Liaison, Wikimedia Foundation 23:19, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Renamed
 This account has been renamed as part of single-user login finalisation. If you own this account you can |log in using your previous username and password for more information. If you do not like this account's new name, you can choose your own using this form after logging in: . -- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 05:44, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

title: User talk:Catamorphism~enwikiquote


text:
Ali Larter

Alison Elizabeth Larter (born February 28, 1976) is an American actress and former fashion model best known for her role on Heroes.

Quotes

 * I work on a TV show I love, I have the opportunity to do movies with actors I respect, and I’m in love with the man I want to spend the rest of my life with, who pushes me and excites me...There’s this fighter in me that kind of needs to be put to rest a little bit. I don’t need to be so tough to protect myself.

 * I love to cook. I spend weekends reading cookbooks-it’s really my relaxation.

 * I told my boyfriend after three weeks that I wanted to marry him and that we could do it tomorrow.

 * I just remember sitting in my trailer hysterically crying from the embarrassment I felt about myself, my body - and that no one could talk to me directly.

title: Ali Larter


text:
User:SuperPigeon~enwikiquote

My Quote

Us Small People are special, theres less of us than average-sized people

title: User:SuperPigeon~enwikiquote


text:
User:Miss.hyper~enwikiquote

Anke Hueper, Karlsruhe, Germany

title: User:Miss.hyper~enwikiquote


text:
Talk:Hyman G. Rickover

Mr President...
Would love to add the famous quote "Mr. President, that is bullshit!" As referenced by no less than President Carter '''Carter, Jimmy (2010). White House Diary. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. pp. 492, 493.''' This was Rickover's response to President Reagan when Reagan removed him from his position in the Navy.

But I know that a lot of the people who come here are nuke sub guys, you guys consider Rickover your guy, so I'll leave the suggestion here and hang back.

Untitled
"You have to learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself." - This quotation looks very much like this one:

"You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t possibly live long enough to make them all yourself." Sam Levenson --Miss.hyper 19:59, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Editorial on the difference between paper reactors and real ones
Anyone out there have the original journal editorial on the difference between paper reactors and real ones?

Thanks in advance - UmptanumRedux 18:31, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Unsourced
Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable and precise source for any quote on this list please move it to Hyman G. Rickover. --Antiquary 11:41, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
 * At any moment during a twenty-four-hour day, only one-third of the people in the world are asleep. The other two-thirds are awake and creating problems.

 * Fish don't vote!
 * On why submarines came to be named after cities and states rather than ocean fish.

 * Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous impatience.

The "Fish don't vote" quote & citation is actually provided here: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/22/us/briefing-navy-reverts-to-fish.html   --104.15.130.191 16:56, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

 * Source for "responsibility is a unique concept" quote (not sure how to cite it): https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hearings/IcO0QpCJdQYC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=The%20Rickover%20Effect%20responsibility%20is%20a%20unique%20concept&pg=PA463&printsec=frontcover&bsq=%22responsibility%20is%20a%20unique%20concept%22

title: Talk:Hyman G. Rickover


text:
User talk:Maddy~enwikiquote

Welcome
Hi, Maddy. Welcome to English Wikiquote. Enjoy! ~ Jeff Q (talk) 20:47, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
 * To ask for help or to talk with another editor, visit our Village pump.
 * To browse Wikiquote, take a look at our browsing start page.
 * To sign with a date, write four tildes ( ~ ) and save.
 * Before creating new articles, consult our guide. You may practice how to edit a page at Sandbox.
 * Be bold.

Your account will be renamed
Hello,

The developer team at Wikimedia is making some changes to how accounts work, as part of our on-going efforts to provide new and better tools for our users like cross-wiki notifications. These changes will mean you have the same account name everywhere. This will let us give you new features that will help you edit and discuss better, and allow more flexible user permissions for tools. One of the side-effects of this is that user accounts will now have to be unique across all 900 Wikimedia wikis. See the announcement for more information.

Unfortunately, your account clashes with another account also called Maddy. To make sure that both of you can use all Wikimedia projects in future, we have reserved the name Maddy~enwikiquote that only you will have. If you like it, you don't have to do anything. If you do not like it, you can pick out a different name.

Your account will still work as before, and you will be credited for all your edits made so far, but you will have to use the new account name when you log in.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Yours, Keegan Peterzell Community Liaison, Wikimedia Foundation 23:28, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Renamed
 This account has been renamed as part of single-user login finalisation. If you own this account you can |log in using your previous username and password for more information. If you do not like this account's new name, you can choose your own using this form after logging in: . -- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 05:52, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

title: User talk:Maddy~enwikiquote


text:
Jaime Pressly

Jaime Elizabeth Pressly (born 30 July 1977) is an American actress and model.

Jaime Pressly Opens Up About Her Divorce And Memoir

 * "Jaime Pressly Opens Up About Her Divorce And Memoir", Redbook

 * We're both strong, and there's something that all Southern women have in common — the survivor instinct.
 * Of her character Joy Turner in My Name Is Earl.

 * There's really no rhyme or reason in our generation as to how things are supposed to work. I don't believe in the words supposed to. I believe in everybody having their own path and their own learning experience. To each his own.

 * When you're with somebody for a long time or have a child with someone, you start to expect them to be this person you had in mind. Then if they don't fill the expectation, resentment starts to come up.

 * Relationships teach you what you do and don't want, what you can and can't put up with, what you do and don't deserve.

 * I learned a long time ago that I can't live my life for everybody else. We learn and we grow from our mistakes, and we get older and more mature.

title: Jaime Pressly


text:
User:Chti~enwikiquote

Nous sommes le Monday 29 July 2024 L'encyclopédie comporte actuellement  articles...

title: User:Chti~enwikiquote


text:
Dan Savage

Daniel Keenan Savage (born October 7 1964) is an American author, media pundit, journalist, and activist for the LGBT community. He writes Savage Love, an internationally syndicated relationship and sex advice column. In 2010, Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, began the It Gets Better Project to help prevent suicide among LGBT youth. He has also worked as a theater director, sometimes credited as Keenan Hollahan.

Quotes

 * We don't say to women, "what do you mean you had a three way with two girls and a guy and you ate her pussy a little bit. You must be a lesbian." But we say to guys, "you mean you [touched a dick]. You must be a fag."… Straight male sexuality is all about this paranoia about am I feminine or am I gay. So the man who allows himself to do something perceived as womanly or faggoty is not a man anymore.
 * In a 1998 interview by James Crotty of Monk magazine

 * The butt is not a magical place that only gay people can visit, like a leather bar or the Liberace Museum.
 * Butting In, Savage Love column, The Stranger, 27 June 2002

 * But just because we're conditioned to view some things as disgusting and immoral doesn't mean that some things aren't, in actual point of fact, disgusting and immoral. Human sacrifice, for instance. Or cannibalism. Or Ann Coulter.
 * Incestathon, Savage Love column, The Stranger, 1 August 2002

 * Seattle sucks. New York and Chicago are real cities. Seattle is Dubuque, Iowa, putting on airs. People here think Seattle is Paris... it ain't. I've been to Paris, and this place isn't Paris.
 * Interview on Zulkey.com, 28 March 2008

 * Despite what Pope Benedict would have us believe, sex without love can be fucking amazing.
 * Disagreeable Advice, Savage Love column, The Stranger, 2 February 2006

 * One man's piss-soaked sadomasochistic orgy is another man's poetic ecstasy.
 * Come to the Bash, Savage Love column, The Stranger, 9 February 2006

 * There is a Karmic Rule of Kink (KROK), and it goes something like this: "Dump the honest foot fetishist and you will marry the dishonest necrophiliac." Break up with a guy over his relatively tame fetish — and a foot fetish is about as tame as they get — and KROK will make sure your next boyfriend is some lying corpsefucker who tells you only what you want to hear. ("Honestly, honey, I only like live girls!") Only after you've married the corpsefucker and had a few kids — once extricating yourself from the marriage becomes a hugely complicated ordeal — will he ask you to lie in a tub of ice until you're good and cold. And when you're lying in that tub of ice — and odds are you will, because you won't want to put your poor kids through a divorce — you'll remember that sweet, harmless foot fetishist whose heart you broke back in college, the man you could have married.
 * Mary's Uterus, Savage Love column, The Stranger, 14 December 2006

 * Yes, we must donate and volunteer and protest and vote, all while reminding ourselves daily that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. And we must commit to defending our friends, neighbors, and coworkers who are immigrants (documented or not), Muslims (American born, immigrants, or refugees), people of color, women seeking reproductive health care, trans men and women seeking safety, lesbian and gay men seeking to protect their families, and everyone and everything else Trump has threatened to harm, up to and including the planet we all live on.
 * But we must make time for joy and pleasure and laughter and friends and food and art and music and sex. During the darkest days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, when Republicans and religious conservatives controlled the federal government and were doing everything in their power to harm the sick and dying, queers organized and protested and volunteered and mourned. We also made music and theater and art. We took care of each other, and we danced and loved and fucked. Embracing joy and art and sex in the face of fear and uncertainty made us feel better—it kept us sane—and it had the added benefit of driving our enemies crazy. They couldn’t understand how we could be anything but miserable, given the challenges we faced—their greed, their indifference, their bigotry—but we created and experienced joy despite their hatred and despite this awful disease. We turned to each other—we turned to our lovers and friends and sometimes strangers—and said, "Fuck them. Now fuck me."
 * [...] We may never eradicate racism and sexism and hatred. But fight it we will. And don't listen to anyone who tells you that music and dance and art and sex and joy are a distraction from the fight. They are a part of the fight.
 * Mourning in America, Savage Love column, The Stranger, 15 November 2016

 * Saying someone—like our president-elect—couldn't possibly be into piss because that particular kink doesn't square with a known character trait and/or aspect of his public persona is like saying a hard-driving male CEO would never pay a dominatrix to tie him up, humiliate him, and shove two dozen needles through the head of his cock because he's such a powerful guy. Or saying a feminist would never wanna have her ass slapped or her hair pulled by a male sex partner. Or saying an out-and-proud gay man would never wanna be called a faggot by the dude fucking his ass. While most powerful CEOs aren't BDSM subs and most feminists aren't into having their asses slapped and their hair pulled and most out-and-proud gay men aren't into being called faggots when they're bottoming, [...] enough of all three are for each to be a cliché.
 * Savage Love Letter of the Day: A Germaphobe Couldn't Be Into Piss, Right?, The Stranger, January 11, 2017.

 * There's nothing the rightwing loves more than a black person willing to say black people are the real racists or a queer person willing to say queer people are the real threat. If you're queer or a person of color and you're telegenic and articulate and willing to sell the rancid cum rag that passes for your soul, you'll never have to do an honest day's work again in your life.
 * "Milo Yiannopoulos: Girls Are In Danger When Adult Trans Women Use Public Toilets But 13-Year-Old Boys Can Benefit From Giving Head To Adult Males", The Stranger, February 20, 2017.

 * Who's more reputable than Dan Savage? I can think of a few hundred million people on the North American continent alone. But, hey, so long as my Wikipedia page—which, for the record, I did not author and only found out about when a web-savvy youngster brought it to my attention—features that hyperflattering photo of me, I'm happy to do my part for them.
 * Savage Love, “Donkey See, Donkey Do”

 * There is a strain of the left that is really invested in show trials and purity testing and virtue signaling... And would rather lose surrounded by perfect allies than win with an army that includes imperfect allies.
 * "'Sex dread' education could be on the rise under Trump. Dan Savage is ready to fight it.", Vox interview, August 3, 2017.

Skipping Towards Gomorrah (2002)

 * My proof that homosexuality is not a choice? A question for my straight male readers: Is there anything I could do or say or write that would convince you to willingly, happily, eagerly, anxiously, deliriously, lustfully put my dick in your mouth and leave it there until I had an orgasm? I rest my case.
 * p. 79

 * Every American may have equal access to ice cream, but there's no guarantee that the outcome of eating ice cream will be equal.
 * p. 165

 * I wasn't going to argue with a German about the psychology of a forced march – not even a guiltless German.
 * p. 203

 * No one has ever gone broke underestimating the insecurities of the gay and lesbian consumer.
 * p. 216

 * Take me to the driest county in the most conservative state, and in two hours this determined hedonist will find you all the drugs, whores, and booze you'll need to pass an eventful weekend.
 * p. 235

 * So while gun owners are always saying that owning guns is about defending freedom, the only freedom gun owners seem interested in defending with their guns is the freedom to defend their freedom to own guns.
 * p. 249

 * Natural isn't something I get called a lot in Texas.
 * p. 256

 * The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means that each of us is free to go our own way, even if the ways some of us may choose to go seem sinful or shocking to our fellow citizens.
 * p. 299

title: Dan Savage


text:
John Irving

John Winslow Irving (born 2 March 1942) is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter (for The Cider House Rules, based on his novel of the same name).

Quotes

 * He wrote Helen that "a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around you who's enough like yourself to understand you."
 * The World According to Garp (1978), ch. 5

 * Imagining something is better than remembering something.
 * The World According to Garp (1978)

 * Imagination, he realized, came harder than memory.
 * The World According to Garp, ch. 5

 * In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
 * The World According to Garp, ch. 19

 * To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.
 * The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), ch. 6

 * You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
 * The Hotel New Hampshire, ch. 11

 * Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.
 *  (1989), ch. 9

 * Your memory is a monster; you forget — it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
 *  (1989)

 * Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean—make sure they know what they mean!
 *  (1989)

 * The kind of people claiming to be in communication with God today … they are enough to drive a real Christian crazy!
 *  (1989)

 * But we are not known for our ability to follow through on our unearned discoveries. We are top-of-the-water adventurers, who limit our opinions of the icebergs to what we can see.
 *  (1996)

 * You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
 * A Widow for One Year (1998), part II, ch. 7

 * Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
 * Until I Find You (2005), ch. 25, p. 493

 * I can't imagine what the first sentence is, I can't imagine where I want the reader to enter the story, if I don't know where the reader is going to leave the story. So once I know what the last thing the reader hears is, I can work my way backward, like following a roadmap in reverse.
 * On his process for writing novels,

 * A reader told me recently, in London, said that 'well, I read that you write the last sentence first, so I always read your last sentence first.' And I said, 'oh, no, you're not supposed to do that.'

 * Ted Seabrooke, my wrestling coach, had a kind of Nietzschean effect on me in terms of not just his estimation of my limited abilities, but his decidedly philosophical stance about how to conduct your life, what you should do to compensate for your limitations. This was essential to me, both as a student—and not a good one—and as a wrestler who was not a natural athlete but who had found something he loved.
 * "John Irving Interviewed by Suzanne Herel." Mother Jones magazine, May/June 1997.

 * This is Marxism. It's leveling everything by decimating what works ... It's that vindictive 'We've suffered, and now we're going to take money from your kid and watch you squirm'... There's a minority which is an open target in this country which no one protects, and that's rich people.
 * In reference to Vermont's Act 60),

 * I write repeatedly—against my will—of those things I fear most happening. Losing a loved one, losing a parent, losing a child. I'm in terror of losing a child. It's never happened to me, but I am clearly compelled to write about it over and over again, and in a way I think, psychologically at least, this says more about me autobiographically as a novelist than the fact that Danny Angel goes to the Iowa Writers Workshop and has Kurt Vonnegut as a teacher, which I also did.

Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1988)

 * Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, Penguin, 1988, ISBN 0-140-10761-4

 * Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either.

 * Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

Quotes about

 * There is no more conspicuous evidence of postsixties confusion than the enormous success, both critical and popular (over 2,500,000 paperback copies in print), of The World According to Garp. Though Garp has its virtues as a novel, I think it owes its status as a phenomenon to its point of view: John Irving attempts to square an emancipated, profeminist stance with a profoundly conservative defense of the family, and because he is such a good storyteller he almost pulls it off.
 * Ellen Willis Postscript: The Backlash According to Irving 1979 in Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (1981)

title: John Irving