re-reading tom robbins is getting me through the cold and gray with some juice intact. here are some of the quotes from “still life with woodpecker”–which you probably need to read or re-read too–that i’m most grateful for.
“Hawaii made the mouth of her soul water.”
“Next, she thought, ‘When two people meet and fall in love, there’s a sudden rush of magic. Magic is just naturally present then. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more. One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone. We hustle to get it back, but by then it’s usually too late, we’ve used it up. What we have to do is work like hell at making additional magic right from the start. It’s hard work, especially when it seems superfluous and redundant, but if we can remember to do it, we greatly improve our chances of making love stay.’ She was unsure if that idea was profound or trite. She was only sure that it mattered.”
“…the ring of truth being the finest sound there is, although there are noises some women make in bed that are definitely in contention.”
“the word that allows yes, the word that makes no possible.
the word that puts the free in freedom and takes the obligation out of love.
the word that throws a window open after the final door is closed.
the word upon which all adventure, all exhilaration, all meaning, all honor depends.
the word that fires evolution’s motor of mud.
the word that the cocoon whispers to the caterpillar.
the word that molecules recite before bonding.
the word that separates that which is dead from that which is living.
the word no mirror can turn around.
in the beginning was the word and the word was
CHOICE”
“If a heart won’t listen to a vagina, what will it listen to?”
“What had disturbed Leigh-Cheri most about Bernard’s note was its evidence of how little he understood her. Like women in general, like Aries women in particular, like redheaded Aries women in greater particular, she loathed to be misunderstood.”
“How can one person be more real than any other? Well, some people do hide and others seek. Maybe those who are in hiding–escaping encounters, avoiding surprises, protecting their property, ignoring their fantasies, restricting their feelings, sitting out the Pan pipe hootchy-kootch of experience–maybe those people, people who won’t talk to rednecks, or if they’re rednecks who won’t talk to intellectuals, who’re afraid to get their shoes muddy or their noses wet, afraid to eat what they crave, afraid to drink Mexican water, afraid to be a long shot to win, afraid to hitchhike, jaywalk, honky-tonk, cogitate, osculate, levitate, rock it, bop it, sock it, or bark at the moon, maybe such people are inauthentic, and maybe the jackleg humanist who says differently is due to have his tongue fried on the hot slaps of Liar’s Hell. Some folks hide, and some folks seek, and seeking when it’s mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous can be a form of hiding. But there are folks who want to know and aren’t afraid to look and won’t turn tail should they find it–and if they never do, they have a good time anyway, because nothing, neither the terrible truth nor the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of earth’s sweet gas.”
