Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates is Tom Robbins' seventh and biggest novel. Invalids follows Switters, our wheelchair-bound antagonist, across four continents, in and out of love and danger. Through Switters, Robbins "explores, challenges, mocks, and celebrates virtually every major aspect of our mercurial era." (Quote from the hardcover book jacket.)
from novel
The worldâs showing signs of waking up from its linear trance, its dangerously restrictive sense of itself as a historic vehicle chuffing down a one-way street toward some preordained apocalyptic goal.
âBad juju rising from the sidewalks. I need to babble with a brook or two, inhale starlight, make friends with some trees.â
He was in a drug-induced neurologically based state of blissful benevolence, a state in which ego softened, fear dissolved and trust expanded.
"All pets eventually become anthropomorphically neurotic."
"The unadorned truth is, adolescent girls are horny as jackrabbits. It's not their fault, nature designed it that way. For the protection of the species.
And there's nothing politics or religion can do to alter that physical reality, short of drugging the girls with medical depressants, or siphoning off their hormones with rubber tubes. Because modern society is by nature unnatural, we're in a state of absolute denial over it. Absolute denial. That our daughters, granddaughters, nieces and little sisters might be highly charged sexual dynamos makes us so uncomfortable, so queasy, that we, men and women both, have to lie to ourselves and pretend it doesn't exist."
"Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates."
"From the peeling wastes east of Al-Zarqa, there cam a faint but persistant cry, a cray to dam the flood tides of semen, to leash the sperm packs running wild in the sheets, to zonk the zygotic zillions and mitigate the multitudinous milt, to garrote the gullible glorification of gamete, forsake the foolish fidelity to fecundity, and wrest free from a woman's shoulders the boa of spermatozoa that the Church had draped there like a weighty shawl and that pulled her ever downward into sickness and servitude, while at her skirts her too-many children went hungry, went bad, or just went."
"It's hard to say who's a greater threat to the world, an ambitious CEO with a big ad budget or a crafty cleric with an obsolete Bible verse."
"I've sucked way too much cement for this year. Bad juju rising off them city sidewalks. I need to babble with a brook or two, inhale starlight, make friends with some trees."
"My faith is whatever makes me feel good about being alive. If your religion doesn't make you feel good to be alive, what the hell is the point of it?"
"Solace? That's why God made fermented beverages and the blues."
