Tom Robbins

From Even Cowgirls Get The Blues

"Perhaps a person gains by accumulating obstacles. The more obstacles set up to prevent happiness from appearing, the greater the shock when it does appear, just as the rebound of a spring will be all the more powerful the greater the pressure that has been exerted to compress it. Care must be taken, however, to select large obstacles, for only those of sufficient scope and scale have the capacity to lift us out of context and force life to appear in an entirely new and unexpected light. For example, should you litter the floor and tabletops of your room with small objects, they constitute little more than a nuisance, an inconvenient clutter that frustrates you and leaves you irratable: the petty is mean. Cursing, you step around the objects, pick them up, knock them aside. Should you, on the other hand, encounter in your room a 9000 pound granite boulder, the suprise it evokes, the extreme steps that must be taken to deal with it, compel you to see with new eyes. And if the boulder is more special, if it has been painted or carved in some mysterious way, you may find that it possesses an extraordinary and supernatural presence that enchants you, and in coping with it--as it blocks your path to the bathroom--leaves you feeling extraordinary and supernatural too. Difficulties illuminate existence, but they must be fresh and of high quality."

From Another Roadside Attraction

"Nothing in the vegetable world succumbs. It simply drops away and then returns. Energy is never destroyed. We planted our dead the way we planted our seeds. After a period of rest, the energy of the corpse or seed returned in one form or another. From death came more life. We loved Earth because of the joy and good times and peace of mind to be had in loving it. We didn't have to be saved from it. We never plotted escapes to heaven, we weren't afraid of death because we adhered to nature and its cycles. In nature, we observed that death is an inseparable part of life...The idea of a spiritual-invisible being was the result of the new and unnatural fear of death. And the idea of a supreme spiritual being is the result of becoming alienated from the workings of nature: When man could no longer observe the solid material processes of life and identify with them, he had to invent god in order to explain how life happened and why death happened."