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"There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in domination, and we are all secretly attracted to violence."
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"It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher."
"When things don't change, their sameness becomes an accretion. That is why all society puts on flesh. Succumbs to the cubicles and begins to fill them."
"Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going."
"A 'normal person' is what is left after society has squeezed out all unconventional opinions and aspirations out of a human being."
"It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so - I don't know - not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way."
"Most people are as happy as other people decide they should be."
"Fashion condemns us to many follies the greatest is to make oneself its slave."
"I had not, it seems, the originality to chalk out a new road to shame and destruction, but trode the old track with stupid exactness not to deviate an inch from the beaten centre."
"People like us are dead to society unless we're pretentious, tell people what they want to hear, take off our clothes, or pretend to be like them."
"A big element of what they regard as conformity is simply a desire to have an audience."
Explore more quotes by Tom Robbins
"The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'"
"But man by his nature is an unnatural animal. If any creature stands a chance of defeating death, it is man."
"In order to tame death, they refuse to completely enjoy life. In rejecting complete enjoyment, they are half-dead in advance - and that with no guarantee that their sacrifice will actually benefit them when all is done."
"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."
"There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better."
"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."
"She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obscured the already vague circumstances of its origins."
"Of the Seven Dwarfs, the only one who shaved was Dopey. That should tell us something about the wisdom of shaving."
"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 wanna see, right? It's a game, right? It's like being paid for dreaming."
"But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity's a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation."
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