Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

by Tom Robbins

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.

You see, the adult males who organized and presided over my Scout patrol in Warsaw had seemed less interested in making outdoorsmen of us boys than in teaching us to drill, box, and to properly care for the American flag. I can see now that they were out to mold us into little fascists, and recalling their incessant racist and anti-Semitic remarks, I have a suspicion that at least a couple were members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Thoreau advised, “Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.” An enterprise that requires old clothes (it usually means manual labor or rough recreation) should raise eyebrows, as well.

“Golf is basketball for people who can’t jump and chess for people who can’t think.”

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?

The French say that the best part of an affair is walking up the stairs. I say that it’s probably better to imagine heaven than to go there.