Still Life With Woodpecker

by Tom Robbins

Ideas are made by masters, dogma by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road.

When you put the blame on society, then you end up turning to society for the solution.

We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect

Dullards can put a pox on the most glorious moral enterprise by using that enterprise as a substitute for spiritual and sexual unfolding. Finally, it is dullness and not evil that begets totalitarianism,

Perhaps she was coming to terms with the space, although surely she realized that space is merely a device to prevent everything from being in the same spot. On the fourth day, she decided to think, in an organized manner, about the problem of romance. “When we’re incomplete, we’re always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we’re still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on—series polygamy—until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, 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 Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls have been looked at so much that they’ve become effete, sucked empty by too many stupid eyes. What is there to minister to the silent zones of man as an individual? How about a cold chicken bone on a paper plate at midnight,