Tibetan Peach Pie Quotes

It's a privilege to love someone, to truly love them; and while it's paradisaical if she or he loves you back, it's unfair to demand or expect reciprocity. We should consider ourselves luck, honored, blessed that we possess the capacity to feel tenderness of such magnitude and be grateful even when that love is not returned. Love is the only game in which we win even when we lose.

If I have been given any gift in this life, it’s my ability to live simultaneously in the rational world and the world of imagination.

Evidently, I'd suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.

It was quite likely the best advice I’ve ever received. I can’t help but wonder what my life would have been like if I’d actually followed it.

(1) When a situation has become too frustrating, a quandary too persistently insolvable; when dealing with the issue is generating chronic discontent, infringing on freedom, and inhibiting growth, it may be time to quit beating one’s head against the wall, reach for a big fat stick of metaphoric dynamite, light the fuse, and blast the whole unhappy business nine miles past oblivion. (2) After making an extreme effort, after pulling out all the stops, one is still unable to score Tibetan peach pie, take it as a signal to relax, grin, pick up a fork, and go for a slice of the apple.

The lesson was the same: This program is subject to change -- often unexpectedly, sometimes in the batting of an eye. It’s the best argument I know against suicide.

Someone once commented that I have a great thirst for knowledge, to which I replied, “What the hell? I’ll drink anything.

Be careful what goes into your mouth and what comes out of it.

At the meeting of our lips, peacocks went into hiding, elephants suffered memory loss, camels developed a maddening thirst, and dinosaurs long thought to be extinct turned up on the evening news.

Seattle, the mild green queen: wet and willing, cedar-scented, and crowned with slough grass, her toadstool scepter tilted toward Asia, her face turned ever upward in the rain; the sovereign who washes her hands more persistently than the most fastidious proctologist.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt more disoriented and alone. Or more thoroughly, serenely, at home. Every true romantic will know what I mean.

What was it like in there? Inside a daisy?” My answer: “Like a cathedral made of mathematics and honey.

That's the value of the artist... Even when they aren't aware, they're dreaming our dreams for us.

nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.

It’s been said that golf is a Zen activity. I’d argue that if golfers were practicing Zen, they wouldn’t keep score.

We each took a fierce delight in introducing the other to some new idea or development, the next amazing artist or record album, always hustling to out-avant the other’s garde.

Someone once commented that I have a great thirst for knowledge, to which I replied, what the hell? I’ll drink anything.

You see, at that juncture in my life I wasn’t evolved enough to understand the fluid nature of romantic love (its indifference to human cravings for permanence and certainty); its uncivilized, undomesticated nature (less like a pretty melody than a foxish barking at the moon), or, more importantly perhaps, that it’s a privilege to love someone, to truly love them; and while it’s paradisiacal if she or he loves you back, it’s unfair to demand or expect reciprocity. We should consider ourselves lucky, honored, blessed that we possess the capacity to feel tenderness of such magnitude and be grateful even when that love is not returned. Love is the only game in which we win even when we lose.

Personally, I’ve found maturity an overrated quality except in wine, for both creative artists and lively people in general have much to gain from facing the world with the unsullied vision, flexible responses, and playful sensibilities of a child.

The hippopotamus is a vegetarian but ferociously territorial (you might find that true of certain vegans you know), and will flip a raft or bite it in half: once one is in the water, the crocodiles show up like a bunch of starving hobos descending on a boxcar full of fried chicken.

I’ve begun to picture my abdominal cavity occupied instead by a single glowing globe,

Now I’d fallen into it like a drunk hobo falling into a vat of champagne.

Hemingway and Norman Mailer might have disagreed, but there is no heavyweight champion of literature.

the concert had energized me in a peculiar and powerful way. It had jimmied the lock on my language box and smashed the last of my literary inhibitions.

to behave as if the thermostats on their imaginations were set permanently on high.

This program is subject to change -- often unexpectedly, sometimes in the batting of an eye. It’s the best argument I know against suicide.

That’s the value of artists, isn’t it? Even when they aren’t aware of it, they’re dreaming our dreams for us.

I’ve long tended to regard the interruption of complacency as a kind of public service.

In the novels he was to write as an adult, transformation (along with liberation and celebration) was a major theme.

So it was that neither for the first time nor the last my verbal mojo, my knack for the written word, served to save my reckless ass.

the Impressionists were able to lead the viewer into mixing color in his or her own eye.

There are those who have condemned Leary as a liar, a sellout, an opportunist, and most of all, a raging egomaniac; but the truth is, he was simply Irish.

the greatest geniuses pee and poop just like the rest of us, but that in no way suggests that we are even remotely their creative equal, except perhaps in the confines of the toilet.

Little devils wrestled with little angels in the innermost chambers of my conscience. The devils cheated, of course, although where my conscience was concerned they were also more familiar with the terrain.

All things considered, I’ve learned more from talking to painters than talking to writers. Not that painters are smarter than writers, such is seldom the case, but in conversation writers are inclined to waste an inordinate amount of time either bragging or bellyaching about reviews and royalties, complaining about their publishers, or dissing other authors. Painters, being equally insecure, can likewise come across as boring and bitchy -- it’s tough being creative in a materialistic society -- but since they labor not in vineyards of verbiage but upon ice floes of visual images, they tend to function with fewer inhibitions than the wordsmiths when it comes to vocally exploring and expressing ideas. Since no one judges their speech, comparing it to their written work, they don’t feel so acutely the weight of language.

Pastor of the Warsaw Baptist Church, Dr. Peters was tall, gaunt, and pale, with a weak damp smile and cold damp palms: shaking his hand was like being forced to grasp the flaccid penis of a hypothermic zombie.

Had Ken Kesey opened Electric Kool-Aid stands on every college campus in the country, it would have made a lesser contribution than Life to the creation of that era of unprecedented foment we like to call “the sixties.

We should consider ourselves lucky, honored, blessed that we possess the capacity to feel tenderness of such magnitude and be grateful even when that love is not returned. Love is the only game in which we win even when we lose.

Granny and me alone on Judgment Day and wonder if there is some wider meaning there, some cryptic message from a hidden dimension, from the Other, from the Over Self. Or if it was simply that heaven didn’t want us and hell was afraid we’d take over.

I’m always astonished when readers suggest that I must write my novels while high on pot or (God forbid!) LSD. Apparently, there are people who confuse the powers of imagination with the effects of intoxication. Not one word of my oeuvre, not one, has been written while in an artificially altered state. Unlike many authors, I don’t even drink coffee when I write. No coffee, no cola, no cigarettes. There was a time when I smoked big Havana cigars while writing, not for the nicotine (I didn’t inhale) but as an anchor, something to hold on to, I told myself, to keep from falling over the edge of the earth. Eventually, I began to wonder what it would be like to take that fall. So one day I threw out the cigars and just let go. Falling, I must say, has been exhilarating -- though I may change my mind when I hit bottom.

When you blow up a major life situation, as I did on two fronts before leaving Richmond, the explosion can leave a hole in your psyche. Nature abhors a vacuum, however, and over time the crater is almost certain to fill in with new wisdom -- or fresh folly. Sometimes it can be a challenge to tell the difference.

The Haight was awash in Christian charity. These kids, simultaneously jubilant and introspective, were practicing what their elders preached. The Haight was the New Testament: animated, activated, brought to life in living color. The naïveté was so thick you could cut it with a Popsicle stick -- but so apparently was Christ’s. Years later, on a wild African savannah a hundred miles from even the crudest settlement, a pride of lions on one horizon, a solitary giraffe on another, I said to myself, “This is the way the world was meant to be and everything else is a mistake.” I’d thought the exact same thing in San Francisco during the Summer of Love.

And did I lose my faith in raffles about the same time and for approximately the same reasons that I quit believing that virgins can have babies; or that if I slay only those people the government encourages me to slay, I’ll be allowed to spend all of eternity in some vaguely located puffyland sipping milk and honey with a huzzahing throng of cheery nonthinkers?

As a result, our big “attic” room was a Hispanic gathering place. Afternoons, it was crowded with boys from Venezuela and Cuba, jabbering away in Spanish, the world’s fastest language, seeming to all talk at once. It was like living in a cage full of parrots whose crackers had been laced with crystal meth. I found it agreeably colorful. For whatever reason, Brugál had not

it’s a privilege to love someone, to truly love them; and while it’s paradisiacal if she or he loves you back, it’s unfair to demand or expect reciprocity. We should consider ourselves lucky, honored, blessed that we possess the capacity to feel tenderness of such magnitude and be grateful even when that love is not returned. Love is the only game in which we win even when we lose.

Now, my all-time favorite accolade from a book reviewer was when Fernanda Pivano, Italy’s best-known critic, wrote in a leading Italian newspaper that “Tom Robbins is the most dangerous writer in the world.” I never read my reviews, even in English, but others sometimes pass choice bits along, so when I had occasion to meet the legendary Signora Pivano at a reception in Milan, I asked her what she meant by that wonderfully flattering remark. She replied, “Because you are saying zat love is zee only thing that matters and everything else eese a beeg joke.” Well, being uncertain, frankly, that is what I’d been saying, I changed the subject and inquired about her recent public denial that she’d ever gone to bed with Ernest Hemingway, whom she’d shown around Italy in the thirties. “Why didn’t you sleep with Hemingway?” I inquired. Signora Pivano sighed, closed her large brown eyes, shook her gray head, and answered in slow, heavily accented English, “I was a fool.” Okay, back to the New York Cinematheque. Why did I choose to go watch a bunch of jerky, esoteric, often self-indulgent 16mm movies rather than sleep with the sexy British actress? Move over, Fernanda, there’s room for two fools on your bus.

Romantic love is ambulatory by nature, and it must be anchored in strata more stable than lust if it’s to last. Marital disintegration is accelerated when only one, or neither, party is grounded and growing, or growing at different rates or in different directions. As I became increasingly interested in cultural matters, matters of the mind and spirit, my teenage bride waxed more and more materialistic.

- modern painting and the psychedelic sacraments -- offered humanity a new way of seeing, an enlarged and deepened definition of reality, a freshened and intensely sensual awareness of what it means to be a cognitive mammal on a tiny planet spinning precariously in the backwash of an infinite universe, a perpetually endangered species kept alive -- and occasionally driven quite mad -- by its capacity to love.

When had it begun, my fantasy of the golden letter? It was probably in my late teens or early twenties that I first became inexplicably possessed of the notion that one day the mailman would deliver a letter to my door that would dramatically alter my life. For the better, I should add: this conviction was in no way a premonition of misfortune or sorrow. In fact, in my daydream the letter was surrounded by a kind of golden aura.

There was a purity about him, a blaze in his eyes, that bordered on the charismatic. I also had the sense that hanging out with him would be dangerous: not because he might prove mean, violent, dishonest, or crazier than anybody else I knew, but because he seemed both completely uncompromised and completely uncompromising. As Henry Miller said of Rimbaud, he was “like a man who discovered electricity but knew absolutely nothing about insulation.

The glue that holds the natural world together appears to be a harmonious balance of opposites: day and night, light and dark, winter and summer, liquid and solid, acidic and alkaline, male and female, wave and trough, proton and electron, etc. There prevails in our reality an explicit duality that represents an implicit unity (the “oneness” about which I’ve previously babbled), and the line of separation between those things just named is as thin as it is necessary: yang rubs up against yin, yin against yang, distinct but mutually supportive.

If I have been given any gifts in this life, it's my ability to live simultaneously in the rational world and the world of imagination. I'm in my eighties now, and if there's one thing of which I am most proud, it's that I have permitted no authority (neither civilian nor military, neither institutional nor societal) to relieve me -- by means of force, coercion or ridicule -- of that gift. From the beginning, imagination has been my wild card, my skeleton key, my servant, my master, my bat cave, my home entertainment center, my flotation device, my syrup of wahoo; and I plan to stick with it to the end, whenever and however that end might come, and whether or not there is another act to follow.

human reality is often simultaneously somber and funny.

those rare homes in which it’s spoken with any regularity are likely under police surveillance.

I'd like to think that had I known the truth, I might have been a kinder, more loving person. If only we knew the Truth, mightn't we all?

a novel that does its own stunts

(I recommend that you make all of your major moves on the first of April. Just in case.)

I do, however, happen to possess a pretty good memory and can at a moments notice name the lineup of the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers and all but one or two of my ex-wives.

I was seven or eight months old - a creeping, crawling carpet crab.

Forget Toni and Nancy, forget Gwendolyn Berryman. Bobbi was on another plane entirely, and I was not so much in love as in awe. It was, of course, unrequited, although she, generally deprived of playmates, seemed fond enough of my company.

but more importantly, I encountered the flesh-bound instrument of secret wisdom and cosmic love torture who was to animate my fantasies and billow the embers of my yearning for the rest of my life. Her name was Bobbi. She was eleven -- an “older woman.

We froze. The night, the earth, the universe slammed on its brakes. Time sucked on a chloroform Popsicle.

a free spirit in the oneness of the whole enchilada, seeing the world -- material and immaterial -- for the all-inclusive miracle it is: not a continuous undifferentiated glob of stuff, mind you, but more like a great spiraling web whose interconnected threads are beaded with pulsing blips that as much as anything else resemble notes of music. I’m all too aware of how woo-woo this sounds, but it was as real

Homeless

The glue that holds the natural world together appears to be a harmonious balance of opposites: day and night, light and dark, winter and summer, liquid and solid, acidic and alkaline, male and female, wave and trough, proton and electron, etc. There prevails in our reality an explicit duality that represents an implicit unity (the “oneness” about which I’ve previously babbled), and the line of separation between those things just named is as thin as it is necessary: yang rubs up against yin, yin against yang, distinct but mutually supportive. The line separating tragedy

Lancelot Delano (that was his actual name, though his friends called him “Gumboot”) was a tall, gawky youth, strong as a mule but sweet as molasses and just about as slow.

It didn’t take me long to conclude that that was the only sensible approach to editing this book of yours. No editor can hope to impose his will on a performance like this one. We’ve got to let Tom run.

In that nondescript period between the end of the beige fifties and the beginning of the Day-Glo sixties, I found myself drifting unfulfilled in an ocean of circumstance.

It was a mocking laugh, imperious even; spiked with the cheap gin of cruelty, but diluted with a splash of amusement, garnished with a sprig of pity; and he soaked me with it, as if he’d emptied a rotgut punch bowl over my head.

Madame Mayor was not amused. Or, maybe she was and just stifled her laughter. Whatever her private reaction, she suspended both combatants for six weeks. And for six weeks there was no law in La Conner. According to full-time residents, the town has never been more peaceful.

You see, at that juncture in my life I wasn’t evolved enough to understand the fluid nature of romantic love (its indifference to human cravings for permanence and certainty); its uncivilized, undomesticated nature (less like a pretty melody than a foxish barking at the moon), or, more importantly perhaps, that it’s a privilege to love someone, to truly love them; and while it’s paradisiacal if she or he loves you back, it’s unfair to demand or expect reciprocity.

I’d like to think that had I known the truth, I might have been a kinder, more loving person. If only we knew the Truth, mightn’t we all?

Off and on, for several years, I’d been reading Zen, I’d flirted with Tantric Hinduism, I’d surfed the smaller swells of Sufism, and tried to get down with the Tao. It was all very eye-opening and inspirational, and while Asian mysticism is an easy target for the sneers of secular cynics and sectarian dogmatists alike, it’s far more compatible with modern science than the misinterpreted Levantine myths, ecclesiastical fairy tales, pious platitudes, and near-desperate wishful thinking I’d been fed in Southern Baptist Sunday School. The wisdom in those spiritual texts was obvious, yet I’d integrated it into my daily life with but minimal success. From a practical point of view, it was like trying to teach a monkey to play chess.

mysticism

We each took a fierce delight in introducing the other to some new idea or development, the next amazing artist or record album, always hustling to out-avant the other’s garde. It was exciting, stimulating, but also draining, especially when coupled as it was with mutual romantic jealousy, arguably the dumbest, most useless of human emotions.

Mediocrity is the standard rather than the exception among practicing artists (Sturgeon’s rule: 90 percent of everything is shit),

I took to spending free days wandering the Joslyn galleries, where, among other things, I tried to reconcile Renoir’s plump and rosy, wine-warmed wenches with the graceful if sinister beauty of the B-47 bombers nurtured and nourished at my air force base, eventually concluding that anything that says yes to life (a Renoir) is automatically saying no to war, regardless of how attractively its weapons and justifications may be packaged. Thus, like those bohemians with whom he was feeling a growing kinship, Airman Second Class Tommy Rotten woke up one morning to find himself once and for all a pacifist.

All things considered, I’ve learned more from talking to painters than talking to writers. Not that painters are smarter than writers, such is seldom the case, but in conversation writers are inclined to waste an inordinate amount of time either bragging or bellyaching about reviews and royalties, complaining about their publishers, or dissing other authors. Painters, being equally insecure, can likewise come across as boring and bitchy -- it’s tough being creative in a materialistic society -- but since they labor not in vineyards of verbiage but upon ice floes of visual images, they tend to function with fewer inhibitions than the wordsmiths when it comes to vocally exploring and expressing ideas. Since no one judges their speech, comparing it to their written work, they don’t feel so acutely the weight of language. The

Behind that rough facade, customers drank beer and danced, activities that to any good Southern Baptist invoked the Devil himself.

we’d see some tattooed fellow with a cigar in his teeth, and with what the Sunday school crowd called a “floozy” on his arm; watch the couple straddle a big Harley-Davidson and go roaring out of the red clay parking lot, enveloped in an oxygen of freedom about whose perils and rewards we could scarcely guess. At those moments, all I wanted was to quickly become old enough to drink beer, dance, get tattooed, smoke cigars, ride motorcycles, and have a floozy of my own on my arm.

I actually enjoyed construction, primarily for the camaraderie.

At the bat of your lashes peacocks preen. Peacocks preen, elephants remember, camels go for days without water, and dinosaurs of all types become extinct.

Romantic love is ambulatory by nature, and it must be anchored in strata more stable than lust if it’s to last. Marital disintegration is accelerated when only one, or neither, party is grounded and growing, or growing at different rates or in different directions.

won many a beer betting that Reno, Nevada, was farther west than Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon, farther north than Portland, Maine. (You can look it up.)

Although at first glance there may appear to be a fairly thin line between them, there are significant differences between the attempt to somehow magically exert one’s will on tangible reality for one’s own benefit (manifestation), and the inspiration to imagine entirely new realities (sometimes to add color and bounce to the drab waltz of existence, sometimes to facilitate the recognition of wonder, sometimes just for the hell of it); between an attempt to mentally force fortune to alter its course for one’s personal gain (to manifest, say, a winning lottery ticket), and possessing the lightness of spirit and the freedom of mind to live as if such developments would pale in comparison to those one regularly experiences at the piano, the easel, the writing pad, or upon viewing a pattern of fallen leaves in the gutter; to live -- against all evidence -- as if advances in fortune were already here.

On our way to the Rock or one or another of our various woodland hideouts, my buddies and I frequently passed The Bark, and we tended to pause there for long minutes and stare at the place, as if it were an evil castle where a great treasure was stored. Once in a while we’d see gentlemen emerge (after, we knew, a bout of drinking and dancing inside); we’d see some tattooed fellow with a cigar in his teeth, and with what the Sunday school crowd called a “floozy” on his arm; watch the couple straddle a big Harley-Davidson and go roaring out of the red clay parking lot, enveloped in an oxygen of freedom about whose perils and rewards we could scarcely guess. At those moments, all I wanted was to quickly become old enough to drink beer, dance, get tattooed, smoke cigars, ride motorcycles, and have a floozy of my own on my arm.