This was my first, but definitely not my last, adventure with Tom Robbins. There were so many moments where I stopped reading to think deeply about or simply appreciate his prose. Beautiful, and thoughtful. How can one not stop to reflect on the following:

"There are essential and inessential insanities."

Or:

"...ideas are definitely unstable, they not only can be misused, they invite misuse - and the better the idea the more volatile it is. That's because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is this process whereby a fresh, stimulating, humanly helpful idea is changed into robot dogma that is deadly."

One of the main settings is Seattle, and, as such, Robbins discusses the rain. Having grown up in the PNW, I have a love and appreciation for the rain and felt more of a connection with the setting than the main characters. When people don't understand my rain relationship, I have no words to describe my connection - now I just need to memorize (with the proper citation, of course) the following:

"The famous Seattle rain. The thin, gray rain that toadstools love. The persistent rain that knows every hidden entrance into collar and shopping bag. The quiet rain that can rust a tin roof without the tin roof making a sound in protest. The shamanic rain that feeds the imagination. The rain that seems actually a secret language, whispering, like the ecstasy of primitives, of the essence of things."