"You can lead a toad to water but you cant make her think."
this and more crackpot babble from "His Royal Weirdness" Tom Robbins.
"Timbuktu. The end of everybody’s road. The capital of Nowhere. Geography’s perennial avant-garde and the armchair traveller’s inevitable cul-de-sac. Timbuktu. Hometown of mystery, fugitivity’s final refuge, remote crossroads where Obscurity runs into Exotica, and Daydream and Exile intersect. Timbuktu. The far of which there is no farther. Out there. Gone. Closer to the moon than New Jersey. Rivaled by only Katmandu as the planet’s most musical city-poem. Tim-buk-tu. One of the phonetic wonders of the world. Great place to pronounce but you wouldn’ want to live there."
"Timbuktu.The last pure place. Isolation being the mother of purity. All men are jealous of Timbuktu bacause Timbuktu is removed from men, it’s the wholeness men have fractured, the sacred extreme they’ve traded away. Like Hell, like Heaven, Timbuktu is a palce in the brain, a place whose existence may be often doubtedbut never dismissed. Timbuktu. A constellation by which the imagination can navigate, the joker that hanst the map-maker’s deck."
"Timbuktu. A town made of pastry dough and starlight. A mirage you can walk around in– if you can stand the heat. Solitary, sealed, and shattered, it wears a mask beneath a mask behind a veil. Timbuktu. A dehydrated Venice, crumbling into a plexus of dust canals. Conceived when the sphinx lay down with the goldbug at a campsite half as old as time. The Sahara crackles in every bite of its bread, the ashes of dead books blow through its streets; the lost wisdom of a dozen races is buried under its drifts, never to be jiggled by the archaeologist’s spade. Timbuktu. A city only an adventurer would risk, only a romantic would forgive, only a nomad would find inviting, only a camel could love."
