To wrap up our posts on Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins, here are some quotes from the final part of the book that inspired me.
I loved the ending of this book. After reading the final page, I put down the book and sat for a while in silence, drinking in the words and thinking about their meaning. I couldn’t help but smile :)
“To be sure, she was exhausted; obviously, she was confused; but she was excited, as well. She felt that she was caught up in some chaotic but grand adventure that was lifting her out of context and placing her beyond the normal constraints of society and biology.”
“he moved through the world as if he was intimate with it, as if he belonged in it, as if there was not the remotest chance that he would fall down in it and break a hip.”
“A mask has but one expression, frozen and eternal, yet it is always and ever the essential expression, and to hide one’s telltale flesh behind the external skeleton of the mask is to display the universal identity of the inner being in place of the outer identity that is transitory and corrupt. A mask, any mask, whether horned like a beast or feathered like an angel, is the face of immortality. Meet me in Cognito, baby. In Cognito, we’ll have nothing to hide.”
“What bothers me today is the lack of, well, I guess you’d call it authentic experience. So much is a sham. So much is artificial, synthetic, watered-down, and standardized.”
“Information gathered from daily newspapers, soap operas, sales conferences, and coffee klatches is inferior to the information gathered from sunlight.”
“Live by the heart if you would live forever.”
“The lesson of the beet, then, is this: hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you’re brown, you’ll find that you’re blue. As blue as indigo. And you know that that means:
Indigo.
Indigoing.
Indigone.”
Has anyone else finished the book? Leave your thoughts below!
click on images for sources.
Love everything about this post.. Tom Robbins is a genius, truly. His writing is digs right through you and stays forever. & the above photography is arresting!
Thanks for this :)
“It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful…”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
“the highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being.” Tom Robbins, Jitterbug perfume. I read it when I was 16. Shaped every love affair since…
I finished it like two weeks after you posted you were reading it. I loved this book. I still find myself thinking about the philosophies of it. The idea of death being a habit, and all habits can be broken. And I love how Kudra describes the realm of the dead. I don’t want to give away too much to someone who hasn’t read. But it all just connects beautifully.