He looked at her with that kind of painted-on seriousness…

He looked at her with that kind of painted-on seriousness that comedians shift into when they get their chance to play Hamlet.

Sourced, Still Life with Woodpecker
(1980)

Other Tom Robbins Quotes

On the poor use of grammar It’s a matter of usage. If a house is off-plumb and rickety and lets in the wind, you blame the mason, not the bricks. Our words are up to the job. It’s our syntax that’s limiting. - View Quote Details on On the poor use of grammar It’s a matter of…
When a man confines an animal in a cage, he assumes ownership of that animal. But an animal is an individual; it cannot be owned. When a man tries to own an individual, whether that individual be another man, an animal or even a tree, he suffers the psychic consequences of an unnatural act. - View Quote Details on When a man confines an animal in a cage, he…
Zippers are primal and modern at the very same time. On the one hand, your zipper is primitive and reptilian, on the other, mechanical and slick. A zipper is where the Industrial Revolution meets the Cobra Cult. - View Quote Details on Zippers are primal and modern at the very same time…
Twenty candles on a cake. Twenty Camels in a pack. Twenty months in the federal pen. Twenty shots of tequila down a yound girl’s gullet. Twenty centuries since Our Lord’s last pratfall, and after all that time we still don’t know where passion goes when it goes. - View Quote Details on Twenty candles on a cake. Twenty Camels in a pack…
They were old enough to know better. Some of them were old enough to remember when old Macdonald had a farm. - View Quote Details on They were old enough to know better. Some of them…
…she recreated the mountains not as she had originally seen them but as she eventually chose to perceive them, not only a capacity to observe the world but a capacity to alter his or her observation of it—which, in the end, is the capacity to alter the world, itself. Those people who recognise that imagination is reality’s master, we call “sages,” and those who act upon it, we call “artists.” - View Quote Details on …she recreated the mountains not as she had originally seen…
I deserve to be chained by night in a church basement without company o’ cassette player if I’m not man enough to ask you for the teeniest, slightest brush of oral-muscular affaction. - View Quote Details on I deserve to be chained by night in a church…
The man and woman firmly shook hands. The solution to the overpopulation problem might rest in such handshakes. - View Quote Details on The man and woman firmly shook hands. The solution to…
There’s no such thing as security in this life, sweetheart; and the sooner you accept that fact, the better off you’ll be. The person who strives for security will never be free. The person who believes that she’s found security will never reach paradise. What she mistakes for security is purgatory. You know what purgatory is, Gwendolyn? It’s the waiting room, it’s the lobby. Not only does she have the wrong libretto, she’s stuck in the lobby where she can’t see the show. - View Quote Details on There’s no such thing as security in this life, sweetheart;…
This is the way to burn,” the fuse seemed to be saying to the more docile, slow-witted candlewick. “Brilliantly, ecstatically, irrepressibly. This is the way to burn. - View Quote Details on This is the way to burn,” the fuse seemed to…