Jitterbug Perfume

First things first: if you haven't noticed by now, I love quotes. When I'm reading a book, I usually do it with a pencil in hand, and go through the whole thing underlining and starring passages/words/paragraphs that I love (only if the book belongs to me, of course). Most books I've read in the past couple of years are marked up like this, and some much more than others. One of the most marked up is my copy of Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. I've dog-eared and pencil-marked the hell out of this thing. So, this is something I've wanted to to do for a very long time, but keep procrastinating on: just write down all the bits and pieces of this book that I've marked in one place. So, here goes, my absolute favorite passages from one of my absolute favorite books. No need to keep reading if you don't want, this is really just for my sake.

Firstly, this book has one of my favorite openings, right up there with the opening of The Poisonwood Bible (which is also one of my favorite books of all time, with the most evocative first paragraph). It is too long to reproduce here, but here is part of it:

"The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious....The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip....An old Ukrainian proverb warns, "A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil." That is a risk we have to take." 1-2

And onward we go....

"On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges" 17

"They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning" 34

"If the world be round, I can scarcely help it" 43

"...they were trading the live wood of the maypole for the dead carpentry of the cross...they were straining so desperately for admission to paradise that they had forgotten that paradise had always been their address." 142

"The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever" 154

"As a point of departure for the psyche, however, a crystal ball has merit, although a mandala, a seashell, or a cigarette pack can be as effectively employed" 157

"Alobar...slipped recklessly out of the shop while the sun's seal was still affixed to the scroll of the horizon" 193

"Like a baby grand in a town without piano movers, Madame had settled firmly into place" 220

"....in Massachusetts it was half past five, a time of night that could lay some legitimate claim to the morning, and a cold crack of oyster light was beginning to separate the sky from the Atlantic" 245

"The universe does not have laws.

It has habits.

And habits can be broken" 251

"Wearing the dawn like silver on their wings" 291

"However more abbreviated than its cousins it may look, February feels longer than any of them. It is the meanest moon of winter, all the more cruel because it will masquerade as spring, occasionally for hours at a time, only to rip off its mask with a sadistic laugh and spit icicles into every gullible face, behavior that grows quickly old" 303

"It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's Day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed. Except to the extent that it "tints the buds and swells the leaves within," February is as useless as the extra r in its name. It behaves like an obstacle, a wedge of slush and mud and ennui, holding both progress and contentment at bay." 304

"But, then, who could guess the identity of any of the costumed or the masked? And wasn't that--and not the lust and the gluttony--the true beauty of Mardi Gras? A mask has but one expression, frozen and eternal, yet it is always and ever the essential expression....The freedom of the masked is not the vulgar political freedom of the Divine, beyond politics and beyond success. A mask, any mask, whether horned like a beast or feathered like an angel, is the face of immorality." 309

"Live by the heart if you would live forever" 317