Still Life With Woodpecker

by Tom Robbins

Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.

the sheepish expression of the premature ejaculator crossed his face.

When a good idea is run through the filters and compressors of ordinary tunnel vision, it not only comes out reduced in scale and value but in its new dogmatic configuration produces effects the opposite of those for which it originally was intended.

we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.

THE MOON CAN’T HELP IT. It’s only an object. The moon doesn’t mean to set things sloshing—in every ocean’s basin, in every female’s uterus, in every poet’s jar of ink, in every madman’s drool.

Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.