Tom Robbins

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

...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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

...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.

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