I think a lot of the misery that people experience comes from that sensation of boundlessness, of infinite possibility.

Fun has to do with habitual activities but then also terrifically novel or unusual ones. It works as a sort of strange milkshake of those concepts.

The problem with fun is we really don't know what fun means at all.

For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.

If you start the day not really expecting substantial change, but anticipating some small new revelation or some small alteration, then over time you're able to find them in more places.

I think this dichotomy or opposition between work and play, between leisure and serious stuff, is definitely a bad way of thinking about the useful insights that play provides.

Play is this process of operating the world, of manipulating things. It's related to experimentation, and it's related to pleasure, but not defined by it.

We have so many choices that it's only always our fault if we're malcontent.

It's not even that finding laundry pleasurable or delightful should be our goal rather than finding television delightful. It's that both laundry and television can be delightful.

The whole idea of play is in finding, acknowledging, and then working with the natural constraints and limitations that you find in the world.

There's just an enormous vast universe of possible intrigue out there and why not pay attention to it? Because then you're not burdened with trying to find that meaning in yourself all the time.

Watch the little ones around you

It's been my experience, Charlotte, that the crisis never comes as or when you expect.

It's very hard to understand when you're not out there but voting somebody off on Survivor almost feels like you're killing them.

The master of your body did not run off and leave you masterless.

Students for a Democratic Society was also affiliated with the civil rights movement everywhere.

What’s working, and how can we do more of it?

In public schooling, social policy has been turned back almost one hundred years.

Do you have a sleeping bag?” I stared at him. “No. I lost it in the great salt-dip of ’06.

The greater the amount of knowledge you accumulate, the bigger your island gets, but the greater the shoreline of the unknown becomes. In short, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both.