...Ode to Tom Robbins...

Ok, maybe not quite an ode, as a great quote-fest. When trying to choose a 'literary quote of the week', I went for Tom Robbins - the fact it took me three weeks to get there was my iron willpower...ahem. I love Tom Robbins as an author so very much. He once explained that he likes to take an incredibly crazy idea or scenario and write himself out of it, like squeezing out of a sticky situation. He is my favourite because he can take you on such a wild ride whilst making clearer sense of the universe. I found it real hard to decide which quote to use so I thought I would share a few of my favourites:

She had never paid much attention to the Middle Eastern situation, per se, and now she knew why. It was an overload of craziness. It was a seventy piece orchestra rehearsing a funeral dirge and a wedding march simultaneously in a broom closet. FROM 'SKINNY LEGS AND ALL'

If spirit is the electrical system that illuminates the house, then soul is the smoky fireplace, the fragrant oven, the dusty wine cellar, the strange creaks we hear in the floorboards late at night. FROM 'VILLA INCOGNITO'

He returned to his Bible, meditating on the verse about how the lilies of the field don't bother to flip burgers or climb the corporate ladder. FROM 'VILLA INCOGNITO'

perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful)thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere - the sudden revelation that there is a there out there. FROM 'JITTERBUG PERFUME'

Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route. FROM 'JITTERBUG PERFUME'

Anyway, I really better stop or I won't have any more quotes of the week.