Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

Come with me, Alobar, for while we must go forever in despair, let us also go forever in the enjoyment of the world.”

Death is impatient and thoughtless.

“Fashions come and go, come and go,” said Ricki, “but the length of the cheerleader skirt remains constant, and it is upon that abbreviated standard that I base my currency of joy.”

“It was wonderful, Pris.” “What was, honey? The meeting? The champagne?” “The eclipse,” said Ricki. “It was probably the most real thing I've ever seen, but it was also like a dream. You know what I mean? Real and unreal, beautiful and strange, like a dream. It got me high as a kite, but it

Jasmine oil has to be extracted, not distilled, and efficient and effective extraction is not quite as easy as tying a loose tooth to a knob.

“No used-car salesman is going to wipe his ass with my perfume!”

“Drapes? You mean draperies. Drape is a verb, the noun is drapery. One drapes a window when one hangs draperies. It is impossible for one to become entangled in drapes, so I assume you were referring to draperies.”

As they say in her country, it's easier to scratch your ass than your heart.”

'Dogs, children, and women are the roots of trouble.'”

“They have another saying: 'If you pay attention to the talk of a woman, the roof of your house will soon be overgrown with weeds.'”

Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere—the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.

“What

difference does it make if you live a million more lifetimes? At least, you can enjoy this one.”

Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good.

How can you respect that sort of weakness, how can you admire a human who consciously embraces the bland, the mediocre, and the safe rather than risk the suffering that disappointments can bring?”

Salvation is for the feeble, that's what I think.

If the earth needs night as well as day, wouldn't it follow that the soul requires endarkenment to balance enlightenment?

By identifying with our desires and taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of those desires.”

THE HIGHEST FUNCTION OF LOVE is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.

Logic limits love, which may be why Descartes never married.

The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being. Still, lovers quarrel. Frequently, they quarrel simply to recharge the air between them, to sharpen the aliveness of their relationship. To precipitate such a quarrel, the sweaty kimono of sexual jealousy is usually dragged out of the hamper, although almost any excuse will do. Only rarely is the spat rooted in the beet-deep soil of serious issue, but when it is, a special sadness attends it, for the mind is slower to heal than the heart, and such quarrels can doom a union, even one that has prospered for a very long time.

Every daydream that involves the past sports in its hatband a ticket to the grave.

“Physical immortality is primarily a matter of vibration,”

It was said that in Paris no whore was too old or too ugly to survive.

How strange it must have sounded, this quarreling about dematerialization, voluntary aging, goat gods, and immortality, to a city that was primed for the Age of Reason, a populace that was beginning to put Descartes before des horse.

he has said that the will to live cannot be overestimated as a stimulant to longevity.

Death bests thee even while thou liveth.”

“Pan is right,” he thought. “Death can ruin a man's life even though he go on breathing.”

And he vowed that in the future he would strive to keep that sense of play more in mind,

for he'd grown convinced that play—more than piety, more than charity or vigilance—was what allowed human beings to transcend evil.

“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 grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.”

but, like a drug addict, he was already too foggy to resist further fogginess.

“Well, there's one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich.”

“Sure and life is a lot o' misery, all right, and death is more misery, yet. Dread, fear, anxiety, guilt, even a bit o' neurosis, are perfectly natural responses to a life that promises such an unacceptable end. The trick is not to take such responses too seriously, not to trivialize your all too short stay in your carton o' flesh by cooperatin' with misery.”

When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form o' self-indulgence.”

And, say, Miss Partido, though I know it's an affront to the Virgin Mary to be mixin' business with pleasure, pleasure is my business—the extension o' pleasure, indefinitely, eternally—and my immortal soul is warmed by the loveliness o' you, you're a sight for sore eyes, so to speak"—he trapped his shamrock patch with his empty snifter—"and I deserve to be chained by night in a church basement without company o' cassette player if I am not man enough to ask you for the teeniest, slightest brush of oral-muscular affection.”

Claude believed that only smart, attractive people had the right to fuck, and it sincerely hurt him when he discovered evidence to the contrary.

We, each of us, have a ticket to ride, and if the trip be interesting (if it's dull, we have only ourselves to blame), then we relish the landscape (how quickly it whizzes by!), interact with our fellow travelers, pay frequent visits to the washrooms and concession stands, and hardly ever hold up the ticket to the light where we can read its plainly stated destination: The Abyss.

“Folks can never be truly happy, or truly free, or even truly sane as long as they got to be expectin' the vigor to decline and the swatter to fall.

Your man ages because he lets his body rust.”

Nutrition was one area, for example, where he might have done some immediately salubrious work, but, alas, there were few diets on Earth so perfect for rusting out the machinery as the starch-and-sugar blizzard, the fatty acid monsoon of prison fare. Wiggs

Heart disease was caused by bad personal habits, cancer was caused by bad industrial habits, war was caused by bad political habits.

love the rich. Somebody has to love them. Sure, a lot o' rich people are assholes, but believe me, a lot o' poor people are assholes, too, and an asshole with money can at least pay for his own drinks.”

“Oh, Daddy!” she said, “Don't you know that when you die, your soul stops leaving your body?”

“Our souls are leaving our bodies all the time, silly. That's what all the energy is about.”

They say that February is the shortest month, but you know they could be wrong.

It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's Day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed.

Were you twice your tiresome length, few of us would survive to greet the merry month of May.

“It's entertaining, but it's empty. It's just another big party. An opportunity for some to spend money and others to make money. It isn't connected to anything larger than itself. I've been a foe of Christianity all my life, but Christianity gave meaning to the fun and the rowdiness, made it more fun and more rowdy. You can't raise hell when you don't believe in hell.”

“Live by the heart if you would live forever,” said Alobar.