Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

The secondary function of a bathroom mirror is to measure murmurs in mental mud.

“Three o'clock in dee night, ma'am. You knows dat in New Orleans it not morning 'til dee sun come up.”

Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.

It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning.

The party in Alobar's head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: existence can be rearranged.

“You know, there's not much that can be done to heal the sting of a woman. As they say in her country, it's easier to scratch your ass than your heart.”

Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked.

The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

This must look ridiculous, he thought, though to whom it looked ridiculous he failed to name.

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.”

A bartender's beauty is in his moves. Like a lover's, like a matador's. The finished product means little: a spent orgasm, a dead bull. Satiation and stringy beef.

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

The difference between love and logic is that in the eyes of a lover, a toad can be a prince, whereas in the analysis of a logistician, the lover would have to prove that the toad was a prince, an enterprise destined to dull the shine of many a passion.

Frequently, they quarrel simply to recharge the air between them, to sharpen the aliveness of their relationship.

Pan had begun to live in his memories, an unhealthy symptom in anyone, suggesting as it does that life has peaked.

“Death hath more than one way to defeat a man, it seems. Death bests thee even while thou liveth.”

“If Kudra is dead, dead as all the others who have died, then I must refrain from driving myself mad by wishing her alive. I do not know why the dead do not come back to life. Perhaps death is so wonderful, in ways we cannot comprehend, that they prefer it over and above their friends and loved ones, although I am inclined to doubt that be the case. If Kudra is dead like all the others, then it does me well to curtail my grief, lest my life become a deathly imitation through depression and sorrow.”

“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.”

Since it was hardly in the best national interest to relieve citizens of their violence, greed, fear, or repression, the government acted to silence Dr. Dannyboy by arresting him on a phony marijuana charge and checking him into the steel hotel.

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.”

Upon hearing his cousin's voice, Claude LeFever's hand had gone as stiff as Medusa's optometrist.

“The universe does not have laws. “It has habits. “And habits can be broken.”

New Orleans rain smelled of sulfur and hibiscus, trumpet metal, thunder, and sweat. Seattle rain, the widespread rain of the Great Northwest, smelled of green ice and sumi ink, of geology and silence and minnow breath.

The loss of the bottle was one of those “harsh realities” with which she was not unfamiliar. If she was relatively equanimous about it, it was because Wiggs was teaching her that “harsh realities” were not the only realities: that there were many different realities, and to a certain extent, with the proper focus of energy, one could choose which reality one wished to live. One might even outwit the harshest reality of all.

nostalgia and hope stand equally in the way of authentic experience"),

Me, I 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.”

February feels longer than any of them. It is the meanest moon of winter, all the more cruel because it will masquerade as spring, occasionally for hours at a time, only to rip off its mask with a sadistic laugh and spit icicles into every gullible face, behavior that grows quickly old.

In the end, politics is always a depressant, and I've preferred to be stimulated.

The lesson of the beet, then, is this: hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you're brown, you'll find that you're blue. As blue as indigo. And you know what that means: Indigo. Indigoing. Indigone.