"I believe in everything; nothing is sacred, I believe in nothing; everything is sacred, …Ha Ha Ho Ho Hee Hee."
— Tom Robbins

"You should never hesitate to trade your cow for a handful of magic beans."
— Tom Robbins

"Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death."
— Tom Robbins

"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, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route."
— Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)

"It s never too late to have a happy childhood."
— Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)

"Ellen Cherry was from the south and had good manners. She didn´t have any panties on, but she had good manners."
— Tom Robbins

"As a child, I was an imaginary playmate."
— Tom Robbins

"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."
— Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)

"We're making it up. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality."
— Tom Robbins

"To diminish the worth of women, men had to diminish the worth of the moon. They had to drive a wedge between human beings and the trees and the beasts and the waters, because trees and beasts and waters are as loyal to the moon as to the sun. They had to drive a wedge between thought and feeling...At first they used Apollo as the wedge, and the abstract logic of Apollo made a mighty wedge, indeed, but Apollo the artist maintained a love for women, not the open, unrestrained lust that Pan has, but a controlled longing that undermined the patriarchal ambition. When Christ came along, Christ, who slept with no female...Christ, who played no musical instrument, recited no poetry, and never kicked up his heels by moonlight, this Christ was the perfect wedge. Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses."
— Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)

"This cave within a cave, this paleolithic pussy, this decent into the deepest dark of fuck."
— Tom Robbins

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

"He was becoming unstuck, he was sure of that - his bones were no longer wrapped in flesh but in clouds of dust, in hummingbirds, dragonflies, and luminous moths - but so perfect was his equilibrium that he felt no fear. He was vast, he was many, he was dynamic, he was eternal."
— Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)

"Human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another."
— Tom Robbins (Another Roadside Attraction)

"Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need."
— Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues)

"She closed her eyes and tried to imagine sex entering the picture. Would sex enter the picture in a silk robe, or would it be as nude as a platter of cold cuts? Would sex enter the picture from the left or the right? Would it ring first, or would it just slide in slyly, too quick and slippery to be denied; or, would sex barge in forcibly, red-faced and green-bereted, pushing all other things aside?"
— Tom Robbins

"The only authority I respect is the one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime."
— Tom Robbins (Another Roadside Attraction)

"On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges."
— Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)

""Love is a myth."
"Love is a myth," Grandfather Trout said. "Like summer."
"What?"
"In winter," Grandfather Trout said, "summer is a myth. A report, a rumor. Not to be believed in. Get it? Love is a myth. So is summer.""
— John Crowley (Little, Big)

"In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry,
a yam of a woman of butter and brass,"
— Marge Piercy

"War is what happens when language fails."
— Margaret Atwood

"In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt."
— Margaret Atwood

"Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

"The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love."
— Margaret Atwood

"There is more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it."
— Margaret Atwood

"Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"Gardening is not a rational act."
— Margaret Atwood

"Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they're yours."
— Richard Bach

"Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years."
— Richard Bach

"The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof."
— Richard Bach

"If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem."
— Richard Bach

"Bad things are not the worst things that an happen to us. NOTHING is the worst thing that can happen to us."
— Richard Bach (One)

"That’s what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we’ve changed because of it, and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way is winning."
— Richard Bach (The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story)

"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly."
— Richard Bach

"Here is a test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: If you´re alive it isn´t.~~~~ "
— Richard Bach

"Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you."
— Richard Bach

" If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats."
— Richard Bach (Illusions)

"If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be."
— Joseph Campbell

"We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us."
— Joseph Campbell

"Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths."
— Joseph Campbell

"I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child."
— Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth)

"We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about."
— Joseph Campbell

"When you follow your bliss...doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors, and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else. "
— Joseph Campbell

"Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?"
— Louise Erdrich

"Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears."
— Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine: A Novel)

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
— Ray Bradbury

"We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out."
— Ray Bradbury

"If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: "It's gonna go wrong." Or "She's going to hurt me." Or,"I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore . . ." Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down."
— Ray Bradbury

"... I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room."
— Ray Bradbury