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.

— Tom Robbins

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 of self-indulgence.

— Tom Robbins

Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective.

— Tom Robbins

White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermingling of cultures unheard of in any other American city, South or North; although there has prevailed a most joyous and fascinating interface, black anger and white fear has persisted, providing the ongoing, ostensibly integrated fête champêtre with volatile and sometimes violent idiosyncrasies.

— Tom Robbins

Who knows how to make love stay?1. Tell love you are going to Junior's Deli on Flat bush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay.2. Tell love you want a moment of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.3. Wake loves up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.

— Tom Robbins

Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival.

— Tom Robbins

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you want to see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.

— Tom Robbins

You know that in New Orleans is not morning 'til Dee sun come up.

— Tom Robbins

You know what I mean? Real and unreal, beautiful and strange, like a dream. It got me high as a kite, but it didn’t last long enough. It ended too soon and left nothing behind.” That’s how it is with dreams,” said Priscilla. “They’re the perfect crime.

— Tom Robbins

You’ve remained on the battleground, center stage, experiencing life and, what’s more important, experiencing yourself experiencing it. You haven't been reduced to a logistical strategy for somebody else's life-war.

— Tom Robbins