My favorite excerpts from the book Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins
Kissing is man's greatest invention. All animals copulate, but only humans kiss. Kissing is the supreme achievement of the Western world. Orientals, including those who tended the North American continent before the ravagement, rubbed noses, and thousands still do. Yet despite the golden fruit of their millennia -- they gave us yoga and gun powder, Buddha and corn on the cob -- they, their multitudes, their saints and sages, never produced a kiss. The greatest discovery of civilized man is kissing.
You've heard of people calling in sick. You may have called in sick a few times yourself. But have you ever thought about calling in well? It'd go like this: You'd get the boss on the line and say, "Listen, I've sick ever since I started working here, but today I'm well and I won't be in anymore." Call in well.
Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need. Perhaps there are times when the contradictions of love are so intermingled that the only way to see the truth of love is to pit it against the irreducible reality of lust. Of course, love can never be stripped bare of illusion, but simply to arrive at an awareness of illusion is to hold hands with the truth -- and sometimes the hard light of lust affords just such an awareness.
A woman without her opposite, or a man without his, can exist but cannot live. Existence may be beautiful, but it's never whole.
If little else, the brain is an educational toy. While it may be a frustrating plaything--one whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them--it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled; you don't have to put it together on Christmas morning. The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometimes they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner form the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of the toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some people's game they say that you have "lost your marbles," not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain. One brain game that is widely, if poorly, played is a gimmick called "rational thought."
The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature. Crumpled into a wad of wrinkles, like the fossilized brain of a dryad; looking weathered; seemingly slow and rough enough to be the product of natural evolution; its brownness the low-key brown of potato skin and peanut shell--dirty but pure; its kinship to tree (to knot and nest) unobscured by the cruel crush of industry; absorbing the elements like any other organic entity' blending with rock and vegetation as if it were a burrowing owl's doormat or a jack rabbit's underwear, a No. 8 Kraft paper bag lay discarded in the hills of Dakota --and appeared to live where it lay. Now empty and leathery-wrinkled, the bag had been twice full. Once, long ago it had borne a package of buns and a jar of mustard to a kitchenette rendezvous with fried hamburger. More recently, the bag had held love letters. ... She fed the letters to the fire one by one. ... As words such as sweetheart and honey britches and forever and always burned away, the cowgirl squirted a few tears. Her eyes were so misty she forgot to burn the bag.